“Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play.”
Ann Vickers (1933) First lines.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Sinclair Lewis 136
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright 1885–1951Related quotes
“No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master.”
"Democracy: Its Presumptions and Realities" (1932); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 99 - 100.
Extra-judicial writings
Context: When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream, as it were. I see children playing on the grass; their voices are shrill and discordant as children's are; they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with another, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.
“I think those neighborhood signs that say 'slow children playing' are so very mean.”
Live at the Purple Onion (2007)
“To play great music, you must keep your eyes on a distant star.”
Source: Rene J. Smith The Spirit of Flight http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Euu4e-4qNAUC&pg=PT30, Peter Pauper Press, Inc., 15 January 2012, p. 30
“The Yellow River flows torrential in my veins.
China is me I am China.”
"Music Percussive", in An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Taiwan: 1949–1974. Vol. I: Poems and Essays, eds. Pang-yuan Chi et al. (Taipei: National Institute for Compilation and Translation, 1977), p. 113
“Playing off of people that great was great for me.”
CBS interview (2000)
“Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.”
Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole
