#y

Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For the novelist the problem is no longer how to tell his tale, but how to close it down; how to switch imaginative energies which have been used in sustaining the tale, into energies which will not just stop it, but will resolve it. The process of telling must be made to predicate its own conclusion. For the reader, in sight of an ending, the mode of attention shifts, the rhythm alters, and a pressure of significance begins to build up behind the closing chapters. The pace of the narrative begins to slow, the 'ever after' looms, past and present emerge in ever sharper juxtaposition. It is this heightened attention to the medium that characterises the ending and we are not surprised to find that for some novelists 'endings' seem to play false to the narrative which leads to them. 'Conclusions are the weak points of most authors', George Eliot wrote, 'but some of the fault must lie in the very nature of a conclusion which is at best a negation'. ↗

— Ian Gregor

#imagination

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#new-york-city #nature

By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors. ↗

— S. Kelley Harrell

#sacred-space #spirituality #nature

Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright? I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#crotchety-old-men #men

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#wwii #death

Sometimes, the Lord just takes blessed people because they've filled their purpose early. Everyone plays their own song. They sing their story to the world and leave behind a melody of memories. Sometimes... their song is cut short and ends too early. But that doesn't mean their music was any less sweet or that they left any less of an impression. ↗

— Linda Kage

#death

Misogynist: one who respects women enough to let them keep to themselves; a feminist. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #mysogyny #respect

Pretty people do ugly things. It was one of those laws of nature that Gaia had understood for years. If she ever started to forget that ride for a second, there always seemed to be some good-looking asshole ready to remind her. ↗

— Francine Pascal

#good-looking #pretty-people #nature

Now, there's no way with servants, but to put them down, and keep them down. It was always natural to me, from a child. Eva is enough to spoil a whole house-full. What will she do when she comes to keep house herself, I'm sure I don't know. I hold to being kind to servants - I always am; but you must make 'em know their place. Eva never does; there's no getting into the child's head the first beginning of an idea what a servant's place is! You heard her offering to take care of me nights, to let Mammy sleep! That's just a specimen of the way the child would be doing all the time, if she was left to herself. ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#servants #nature

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again? ↗

— Emily Brontë

#poetry #death