It’s a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly – so far anyway – eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring.
And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice.
The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.
Norfolk is full of medieval churches – it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world.
In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.
All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
The day when people once again die from the scratch of a rose thorn may not be far away.
We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.
Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.
Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.
Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.
To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement.
As Herman Melville put it: “We are not so much a nation as a world.
When even camels can’t manage a desert, you know you’ve found a tough part of the world.
The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once.
The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With Wings, it confirmed Bow as Hollywood’s leading female star. She received forty thousand letters a week – more than the population of a fair-sized town. In the summer of 1927, her career seemed set to go on indefinitely. In fact, it was nearly at an end. Winsome and enchanting as she was to behold, her Brooklyn accent was the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard, and in the new world of talking pictures that would never do.
In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area.
By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side – one to live in, one to decorate over and over – seems admirably restrained.
If one attitude can be said to characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now.