Yquotes.com

 

Henry avoids all commonplace, & talks birch bark to all comers, & reduces them all to the same insignificance.
--
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Selected Journals 1841–1877, edited by Lawrence Rosenwald (2010), p. 688

 

Henry David Thoreau

» Henry David Thoreau - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

'I can repeat the very words you were saying:
"Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build."
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?
You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.

 

Robert Frost

 

Gary: You ought never to have joined the Athenaeum Club, Henry: it was disastrous.
Henry: I really don’t see why.
Gary: It’s made you pompous.
Henry: It can’t have. I’ve always been too frightened to go into it.

 

Noel Coward

 

When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for protecting the tenant right of the small farmer, and pleaded in the House of Commons for more drastic land legislation, wrote "Wealth is like muck. It is not good but if it be spread," he was expressing in an epigram what was the commonplace of every writer on politics from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth century to Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth.

 

Francis Bacon

 

When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach... So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.

 

Donald Barthelme