He of the Otter Skins drew over to the stove as do men who have been deprived of fire and are afraid the Promethean gift may vanish at any moment.
There was something venomous and snakelike in the boy's black eyes. They burned like cold fire, as with a vast, concentrated bitterness.
Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience.
But his pinch will come in learning properly to shape his mind’s attitude toward all things, and especially toward his fellow man. For the courtesies of ordinary life, he must substitute unselfishness, forbearance, and tolerance. Thus, and thus only, can he gain that pearl of great price – true comradeship.
And, dying, he declined to die. It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of Death he defied Death and refused to die.
On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with atangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres ofdeep water affect the body of the diver.
I, too, suffered equally with them from pain and thirst; but added to my suffering was the fact that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the others.
Then the business game is to make profits out of others, and to prevent others from making profits out of you.
Surely there can be little in this world more awful than the spectacle of a strong man in the moment when he is utterly weak and broken.
I wandered all these years among a world of women, seeking you.
There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the child’s definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy.
I held that life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and that living was merely successful piggishness.
His face continually spread to an unending succession of smiles, and when Danny smiled he smiled in every feature, even to the laughter-wrinkles of the corners of the eyes and into the depths of the eyes themselves.
But one task did Nature set the individual. Did he not perform it, he died. Did he perform it, it was all the same, he died. Nature did not care; there were plenty who were obedient, and it was only the obedience in this matter, not the obedient, which lived and lived always.
It was a primitive life, that of her childhood, with few conventions,but such as there were, stern ones. And they might be epitomized, asshe had read somewhere in her later years, as "the faith of food andblanket."
Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity—the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery—but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice.