Praeterita, volume I, chapter IX (1885-1889).
Context: My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.
“Perhaps I’ve been rushing my whole entire life, jumping into things headfirst without thinking them through. Running through the days without noticing the minutes.”
Source: Thanks for the Memories
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Cecelia Ahern 156
Irish novelist 1981Related quotes
A 58
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook A (1765-1770)
Heard, personally, in 1921 or 1922 by the interviewer William H. Hendrix, staff writer for the New York Daily News, and later reported by Hendrix in New York Daily News, 13 March 1961; see "Animal Experiments", in Los Angeles Times, 26 October 1991 http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-26/entertainment/ca-318_1_ecumenical-patriarch-dimitrios. Quoted in Hans Ruesch, Slaughter of the Innocent, Bantam Books, 1978, p. 235.
“Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.”
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.”
Source: The Woman in White
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), II
Context: Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!