Term
| In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. |
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Definition
| Henry Adams from the Education of Henry Adams |
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Term
| In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley..." |
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Definition
| Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" |
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Term
| However, lacking both time and inclination. I did not wait to hear about the afflicted cow, but took my leave. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" |
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Term
| Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" |
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Term
| They require that the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk...But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" |
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Term
| In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices, for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" |
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Term
| A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" |
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Term
| It was the last autumn and first day of winter coming together. All day long the ploughmen on their prairie farms had moved to and fro on their wide level fields through the falling snow, which melted as it fell... |
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Definition
| Hamlin Garland "Under the Lion's Paw" |
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Term
| I think you're a thief and a liar, ...A black hearted houn'! |
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Definition
| Haskins from Under the Lion's Paw |
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Term
| Butler backed away from the man in wild haste, and climbing into his buggy with trembling limbs, drove off down the road, leaving Haskins seated dumbly on the sunny pile of sheaves, his head sunk into his hands. |
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Definition
| Hamlin Garland "Under the Lion's Paw" |
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Term
| Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. |
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Definition
| Jane from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper |
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Term
| I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. "I've got out at last....in spite of you and Jane!..." |
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Definition
| Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (Jane speaking) |
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Term
All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.
the river is a metaphor for reading |
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Definition
| Mark Twain - Old Times on the Mississippi |
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Term
| Her face and her voice all at his service now, worked the miracle - the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-jets. |
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Definition
| Henry James - The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong. It hadn't been Rome - it had been Naples... |
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Definition
| Henry James - The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| You know you told me something I've never forgotten and that again and again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze...Have you forgotten? |
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Definition
| May from James' The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| Of course what's in store for me may be no more than that. |
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Definition
| Marcher from The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| ...the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. |
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Definition
| James - The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage? |
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Definition
| James - The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. |
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Definition
| James - The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast...he flung himself, face down, on the tomb. |
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Definition
| James - The Beast in the Jungle |
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Term
| It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative - much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius - it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. |
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Definition
| Henry James - the Art of Fiction |
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Term
| Cooper’s proudest creations in the way of “situations” suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer’s protecting gift. |
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Definition
| Mark Twain - Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses |
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Term
| What is character bu the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? |
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Definition
| James - The Art of Fiction |
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Term
| this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience...'Write from experience and experience only' ...careful to immediately add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!' |
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Definition
| James - The Art of Fiction |
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Term
| ..the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. |
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Definition
| Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams |
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Term
| The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in American neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force - at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either. |
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Definition
| Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams |
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Term
| No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. |
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Definition
| Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams |
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Term
| And comes the other fall we name the fall..../The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - The Oven Bird |
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Term
| They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars-on stars where no human race is./I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - Desert Places |
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Term
| I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,/On a white heal-all, holding up a moth |
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Definition
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Term
| What but design of darkness to appall?-/If design govern in a thing so small. |
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Definition
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Term
| The land was ours before we were the land's. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - The Gift Outright |
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Term
| But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,/Such as she was, such as she would become. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - The Gift Outright |
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Term
| I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;/I'll only stop to rake the leaves away..../I shan't be gone long.-You come too. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - The Pasture |
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Term
| The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - The Figure a Poem Makes |
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Term
| They thought all chopping was their of right./Men of the woods and lumberjacks,/They judged me by their appropriate tool./Except as a fellow handled an ax/They had no way of knowing a fool. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - Two Tramps in Mud Time |
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Term
| Only where love and need are one,/And the work is play for mortal stakes,/Is the deed ever really done/For Heaven and the future's sakes. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost - Two Tramps in Mud Time |
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Term
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Definition
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Term
| poetry is meant to purify the dialect of the tribe |
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Definition
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Term
| bear the brunt of our America...You an Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts/Show us there's chance at least of winning through. |
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Definition
| Pound - To Whistler, American |
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Term
| You have been second always. Tragical?/No. You preferred it to the usual thing;/One dull man, dulling and uxorious |
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Definition
| Pound - Portrait d'une Femme |
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Term
| No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,/Nothing that's quite your own./Yet this is you. |
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Definition
| Pound - Portrait d'une Femme |
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Term
| I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman - / I have detested you long enough. |
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Definition
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Term
| The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals an a wet, black bough. |
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Definition
Pound - In a Station on the Metro
(no abstraction) |
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Term
| Why should I climb the look out? |
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Definition
| Pound - The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter |
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Term
| And I will come to meet you./As far as Cho-fu-Sa. |
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Definition
| Pound - River Merchant's Wife: A Letter |
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Term
| In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo. |
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Definition
| T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock |
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Term
| The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,/Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening |
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Definition
| T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock |
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Term
| Do I dare/Disturb the universe?/In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. |
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Definition
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Term
| I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. |
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Definition
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Term
| And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,/And in short, I was afraid. |
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Definition
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Term
| I do not think that they will sing to me. |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
| Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent |
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Term
| Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. |
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Definition
| Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent |
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Term
| This: were we led all that way for/Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen a birth and death,/But had thought they were different;this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.../I should be glad of another death. |
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Definition
| Eliot - Journey of the Magi |
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Term
| Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past./If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable. |
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Definition
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Term
| They enter the new world naked,/cold, uncertain of all/save that they enter./ All about them/the cold, familiar wind-- |
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Definition
| William Carlos Williams - Spring and All |
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Term
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Definition
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Term
| Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. |
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Definition
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Term
| I lost everything I wanted in the boom. |
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Definition
| Charlie from Fitz's Babylon Revisited |
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Term
| he suddenly realized the meaning of the word "dissipate" - to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. |
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Definition
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Term
| momentary stay against confusion |
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Definition
| Frost - The Figure a Poem Makes |
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Term
| For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them. |
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Definition
| Edith Wharton - Roman Fever |
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Term
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Definition
| Mrs. Ansley from Wharton's Roman Fever |
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Term
| After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn't write. |
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Definition
| Mrs. Slade from Wharton's Roman Fever |
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Term
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Definition
| Mrs. Ansley from Wharton's Roman Fever |
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Term
| Go in fear of abstractions |
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Definition
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