His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and was covered with dry, straw-coloured hair that fuzzed up about his pointed crown.
Clearly, they were proud of each other, and of being so many.
It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee. ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’ I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. ‘Primus ego in patriam mecum... deducam Musas’; ’for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.
Like all romancers, she is a little terrified at seeing one of her wildest conceits admitted by the hard-headed world. If our dream comes true, we are almost afraid to believe it; for that is the best of all good fortune, and nothing better can happen to any of us.
The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on.
The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.
It was a crisp autumn evening, just cold enough to make one glad to quit playing tag in the yard, and retreat into the kitchen.
Father Latour reflected. “And the silver of the Spanish was really Moorish, was it not? If not actually of Moorish make, copied from their design. The Spanish knew nothing of working silver, except as they learned it from the Moors.
Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.
She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true.” – Jim Burden.
It wasn’t American to explain yourself; you didn’t have to!
There never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had.
Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.
Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were captives dwelling in darkness, never seen from birth to death. Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all.
The forest rose about this open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of horsechestnut and beech. The big nuts dropped velvety and brown, as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry leaves below. Little black yew trees, that had not been visible in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes. Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes glittered.
She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening air was heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer. Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their milky stalks, the air about them was saturated with their breath.
Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and his views about things.
Ah well, that is a missionary’s life; to plant where another shall reap.
The right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do.
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it – for a little while.