“We all know the beautiful hymn commencing with the cheerful line: "Hark from the tombs, a doleful sound." Nothing could have been more appropriate for children. It is well to put a coffin where it can be seen from the cradle. When a mother nurses her child, an open grave should be at her feet. This would tend to make the babe serious, reflective, religious and miserable.”

Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Context: He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes, 1979)

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 18

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 599

Source: Northanger Abbey (1817)

Adverbs (2006), Obviously

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)