Quotes about spell
page 4
Introduction to My Correct Views on Everything
“But on her side the Colchian ceases not to foam with hellish poisons and to sprinkle all the silences of Lethe's bough: exerting her spells she constrains his reluctant eyes, exhausting all her Stygian power of hand and tongue.”
Contra Tartareis Colchis spumare venenis
cunctaque Lethaei quassare silentia rami
perstat et adverso luctantia lumina cantu
obruit atque omnem linguaque manuque fatigat
vim Stygiam.
Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 83–87
Quoted in his obituary Dartmouth College news release http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/06/10.html
Other
Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 6 (Cuba).
Candle in the Wind 1997, written in tribute upon the death of Diana (1997)
Song lyrics, Singles
20.10-18
Finnegans Wake (1939)
Sermon in a Churchyard, st. 8 (1825)
Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)
c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 155
as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255, - Jorn talks about the Nordic concept of Expressionism
1959 - 1973, Alpha and Omega', (1963–64)
“Let worldly coldness and care depart,
And yield to the spell of the minstrel's art.”
The Golden Violet - title poem - The First Day
The Golden Violet (1827)
"Government Injunction Restraining Harlem Cosmetic Co." (1941) St. 2–3; Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1983
“Aggressive Fancy working spells
Upon a mind o’erwrought.”
Pt. I, sc. vi, Napoleon
The Dynasts (1904–1908)
“Darkrose and Diamond” (p. 110)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)
Modern spelling: Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
Mourt's Relation
"The Death of Doctor Island", Universe 3 (1973), ed. Terry Carr, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980). Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction
(28th February 1824) Metrical Tales. Tale I. The Three Wells - A Fairy Tale
The London Literary Gazette, 1824
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)
Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (pp. 190-191).
Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 554–561
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)
Vol. I, ch. 9.
Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
“The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.”
Eugene Aram (1832), Book i, Chapter vii.
Tarikh-i-Salim Shahi, p. 16. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5
The Best-Loved Game (1979).
"2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA&list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&index=2, Youtube (November 24, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)
Foreword to Wikis for Dummies
Source: Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 129
“It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”
More commonly misattributed to Andrew Jackson, the originator of this line is actually unknown.
Misattributed
Budget speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/apr/17/financial-statement in the House of Commons (17 April 1934)
Chancellor of the Exchequer
lecture III: "This Unscientific Age"
The Meaning of It All (1999)
Gebir, Book I (1798). It is reported that "these lines were specially singled out for admiration by Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Scott, and many remarkable men"; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), citing Forster, Life of Landor, vol. i. p. 95.
The Europe Fiasco. p. 71.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)
"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004)
If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)
Source: Addiction to Perfection (1982), p. 11
Source: Jack of Shadows (1971), Chapter 11 (p. 118)
"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism
'On the Death of my First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips' (1655), as reported in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 575
Speech to Conservative Central Council ("The Historic Choice") (20 March 1976) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102990
Leader of the Opposition
Kashmiri Song
Indian Love Lyrics (aka Garden of Kama) (1901)
"The Furniture Rule", explaining the differences and similarities between the fields of weird fiction in Dreamsongs
Prologue p. 5
The Sabbath (1951)
"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)
Hindu Society under Siege (1981, revised 1992)
Monod (1971) Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. p. 180
“Tara: Well, I go online sometimes, but everyone's spelling is really bad. It's depressing.”
Family [5.6]
Willow & Tara (2000-2002)
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), The Libation Bearers, lines 600–601 (tr. Anna Swanwick)
The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Context: The Glass Bead Game, formerly the specialized entertainment of mathematicians in one era, philologists or musicians in another era, now more and more cast its spell upon all true intellectuals. Many an old university, many a lodge, and especially the age-old League of Journeyers to the East, turned to it. Some of the Catholic Orders likewise scented a new intellectual atmosphere and yielded to its lure. At some Benedictine abbeys the monks devoted themselves to the Game so intensely that even in those early days the question was hotly debated — it was subsequently to crop up again now and then — whether this game ought to be tolerated, supported, or forbidden by Church and Curia.
Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 1 : The Rules of the Game
Context: Considering that the square game is only one of the five or ten varieties of the game of marbles, it is almost alarming in face of the complexity of rules and procedure in the square game, to think of what a child of twelve has to store away in his memory. These rules, with their overlapping and their exceptions, are at least as complex as the current rules of spelling. It is somewhat humiliating, in this connection, to see how heavily traditional education sets about the task of making spelling enter into brains that assimilate with such ease the mnemonic contents of the game of marbles. But then, memory is dependent upon activity, and a real activity presupposes interest.
“And, like some low and mournful spell,
To whisper but one word—farewell!”
A Thought on Parting.
Context: But then to part! to part when Time
Has wreathed his tireless wing with flowers,
And spread the richness of a clime
Of fairy o'er this land of ours;
When glistening leaves and shaded streams
In the soft light of Autumn lay,
And, like the music of our dreams,
The viewless breezes seemed to stray—
'T was bitter then to rend the heart
With the sad thought that we must part;
And, like some low and mournful spell,
To whisper but one word—farewell!
Song lyrics, American Pie (1971), American Pie
Context: So come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
'Cause fire is the Devil's only friend
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan's spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died.
"The Return of Jimi Hendrix"
Dream Harder (1993)
Context: He did a forty-two minute
cosmic rise in future shocks
Star Spangled Banner
in the back of CBGB's He stopped every clock in New York state
and every heart that heard him
and time itself was beaten and confused
and fell lamb-like under the spell of his
fabulous flashing fingers He played an encore at the Bitter End
a heartburst Little Wing
even the waiters cried
and then we fell outside
and in the dusty dawn of Bleeker street
a sweet rain fell
and Jimi died.
“Sudden thy silent beauty on me shone,
Fair as the moon had given thee all her spell.”
"Sonnet I" in The Galaxy Vol. XIX, (January - June 1875), p. 747.
Context: Sudden thy silent beauty on me shone,
Fair as the moon had given thee all her spell.
Then, as Endymion had found on earth,
In unchanged beauty but in fashion changed,
Her whom I loved so long; so felt I then,
Not that a new love in my heart had birth,
But that the old, that far from reach had ranged,
Was now on earth, and to be loved of men.
1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: "Improved means to an unimproved end". This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
Letter III
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: The Mahometans say their Koran was written by God. The Hindoos say the Vedas were; we say the Bible was, and we are but interested witnesses in deciding absolutely and exclusively for ourselves. If it be immeasurably the highest of the three, it is because it is not the most divine but the most human. It does not differ from them in kind; and it seems to me that in ascribing it to God we are doing a double dishonour; to ourselves for want of faith in our soul's strength, and to God in making Him responsible for our weakness. There is nothing in it but what men might have written; much, oh much, which it would drive me mad to think any but men, and most mistaken men, had written. Yet still, as a whole, it is by far the noblest collection of sacred books in the world; the outpouring of the mind of a people in whom a larger share of God's spirit was for many centuries working than in any other of mankind, or who at least most clearly caught and carried home to themselves the idea of the direct and immediate dependence of the world upon Him. It is so good that as men looked at it they said this is too good for man: nothing but the inspiration of God could have given this. Likely enough men should say so; but what might be admired as a metaphor became petrified into a doctrine, and perhaps the world has never witnessed any more grotesque idol-worship than what has resulted from it in modern Bibliolatry. And yet they say we are not Christians, we cannot be religious teachers, nay, we are without religion, we are infidels, unless we believe with them. We have not yet found the liberty with which Christ has made us free. Infidels, Arthur! Ah, it is a hard word! The only infidelity I know is to distrust God, to distrust his care of us, his love for us. And yet that word! How words cling to us, and like an accursed spell force us to become what they say we have become.
“Suffering willingly endured is stronger than evil, it spells death to evil.”
Source: Discipleship (1937), Revenge, p. 142.
Context: Jesus bluntly calls the evil person evil. If I am assailed, I am not to condone or justify aggression. Patient endurance of evil does not mean a recognition of its rights. That is sheer sentimentality, and Jesus will have nothing to do with it. The shameful assault, the deed of violence and the act of exploitation are still evil. … The very fact that the evil which assaults him is unjustifiable makes it imperative that he should not resist it, but play it out and overcome it by patiently enduring the evil person. Suffering willingly endured is stronger than evil, it spells death to evil.
Technopagans at the End of History (1998)
Context: It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth.
Directive (1947)
Context: I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
On using the name "Elvis" as a stage name in The First 10 Years Podcast Series http://www.elviscostello.com/media.aspx - Episode Two
Context: I had a lot of problems with my name … my first name Declan is really not very well known outside of Ireland, MacManus is a name they could never spell... if you think about the names of '76, '77 … I got off kind of lightly — with a name you could live with, you know, in time. … I kind of liked the dare of it. Of course we weren't to know that within a month of my first album actually being issued Elvis Presley would die, and it would actually be a talking point. … Let me put it this way — people don't forget you with that name. It's sort of receded as — and this may sound terribly disrespectful and heretical — but as Elvis Presley has receded as a musical force, people make much less of a case about it. Elvis is a sort of cultural figure but there is no direct line between the music of Elvis Presley and the music of today. There is none whatsoever, he's no influence whatsoever, that I can detect, on music made today. Other than people who consciously retro in styling themselves after his ideas. There is no direct impact in the way that you can hear the influence of The Beatles or Stevie Wonder or numerous other people.
A Pluralistic Universe (1909) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11984/11984-8.txt, Lecture I
1900s
Context: Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.
Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that originally interfered.
Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by the frequency with which we experience their egress.
For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.
All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to think and do?—and I think the history of philosophy largely bears him out, "The aim of knowledge," says Hegel, "is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home in it." Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world.
Illness As Metaphor (1978), foreword, p. 3,
Context: Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), The Lady of the Land
Context: What man art thou that thus hast wandered here,
And found this lonely chamber where I dwell?
Beware, beware! for I have many a spell;
If greed of power and gold have led thee on,
Not lightly shall this untold wealth be won.
But if thou com'st here knowing of my tale,
In hope to bear away my body fair,
Stout must thine heart be, nor shall that avail
If thou a wicked soul in thee dost bear;
So once again I bid thee to beware,
Because no base man things like this may see,
And live thereafter long and happily.
St. 7
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
Source: "Year in Review" in Rolling Stone (15 December 1988)
Source: Fares, Please! (1915), Everything Upside Down, p. 186
Context: Charles Lamb, in one of his most delightful essays, sets high worth on the observance of All Fools' Day, because it says to a man: "You look wise. Pray correct that error!" Christmas brings the universal message to men: "You look important and great; pray correct that error." It overturns the false standards that have blinded the vision and sets up again in their rightful magnitude those childlike qualities by which we enter the Kingdom.
Christmas turns things inside out. Under the spell of the Christmas story the locked up treasures of kindliness and sympathy come from the inside of the heart, where they are often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual expression in deed and word. … It is the vision of the Christ-child which enables all men to get at the best treasures of their lives and offer them for use.
Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 216; this paragraph was quoted as "context (0) - THE INNIS MODE" by John Brunner, the epigraph or first chapter in his novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Context: There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...
“There is a spell of unresisted power
In wonder-working weak simplicity,
Because it is not fear'd.”
Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus
Context: The mighty Jove did love us. Did? He does.
There is a spell of unresisted power
In wonder-working weak simplicity,
Because it is not fear'd.
"Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" in Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989)
Context: Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city... Numbers here constitute an address, a thrilling enough prospect for slaves who had owned nothing, least of all an address. And although the numbers, unlike words, can have no modifiers, I give these an adjective — spiteful… A few words have to be read before it is clear that 124 refers to a house … and a few more have to be read to discover why it is spiteful, or rather the source of the spite. By then it is clear, if not at once, that something is beyond control, but is not beyond understanding since it is not beyond accommodation by both the "women" and the "children." The fully realized presence of the haunting is both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand. One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world. … Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from the "author," with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey. …. No compound of houses, no neighborhood, no sculpture, no paint, no time, especially no time because memory, pre-historic memory, has no time. There is just a little music, each other and the urgency of what is at stake. Which is all they had. For that work, the work of language is to get out of the way.
Act IV, scene 1, as translated by Getrude Hall
Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)
Context: Valvert: Your … your nose is … errr … Your nose … is very large!
Cyrano: [gravely] Very.
Valvert: [laughs] Ha!
Cyrano: [imperturbable] Is that all?
Valvert: But …
Cyrano: Ah, no, young man, that is not enough! You might have said, dear me, there are a thousand things … varying the tone … For instance … Here you are: — Aggressive: "I, monsieur, if I had such a nose, nothing would serve but I must cut it off!" Amicable: "It must be in your way while drinking; you ought to have a special beaker made!" Descriptive: "It is a crag! … a peak! … a promontory! … A promontory, did I say? … It is a peninsula!" Inquisitive: "What may the office be of that oblong receptacle? Is it an inkhorn or a scissor-case?" Mincing: "Do you so dote on birds, you have, fond as a father, been at pains to fit the little darlings with a roost?" Blunt: "Tell me, monsieur, you, when you smoke, is it possible you blow the vapor through your nose without a neighbor crying "The chimney is afire!"?" Anxious: "Go with caution, I beseech, lest your head, dragged over by that weight, should drag you over!" Tender: "Have a little sun-shade made for it! It might get freckled!" Learned: "None but the beast, monsieur, mentioned by Aristophanes, the hippocampelephantocamelos, can have borne beneath his forehead so much cartilage and bone!" Off-Hand: "What, comrade, is that sort of peg in style? Capital to hang one's hat upon!" Emphatic: No wind can hope, O lordly nose, to give the whole of you a cold, but the Nor-Wester!" Dramatic: "It is the Red Sea when it bleeds!" Admiring: "What a sign for a perfumer's shop!" Lyric: "Art thou a Triton, and is that thy conch?" Simple: "A monument! When is admission free?" Deferent: "Suffer, monsieur, that I should pay you my respects: That is what I call possessing a house of your own!" Rustic: "Hi, boys! Call that a nose? You don't gull me! It's either a prize parrot or a stunted gourd!" Military: "Level against the cavalry!" Practical: "Will you put up for raffle? Indubitably, sir, it will be the feature of the game!" And finally in parody of weeping Pyramus: "Behold, behold the nose that traitorously destroyed the beauty of its master! and is blushing for the same!" — That, my dear sir, or something not unlike, is what you could have said to me, had you the smallest leaven of letters or wit; but of wit, O most pitiable of objects made by God, you never had a rudiment, and of letters, you have just those that are needed to spell "fool!" — But, had it been otherwise, and had you been possessed of the fertile fancy requisite to shower upon me, here, in this noble company, that volley of sprightly pleasentries, still should you not have delivered yourself of so much as a quarter of the tenth part of the beginning of the first … For I let off these good things at myself, and with sufficient zest, but do not suffer another to let them off at me!"
"The Holy Dimension", p. 338
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: The account of our experiences, the record of debit and credit, is reflected in the amount of trust or distrust we display towards life and humanity. There are those who maintain that the good is within our reach everywhere; you have but to stretch out your arms and you will grasp it. But there are others who, intimidated by fraud and ugliness, sense scorn and ambushes everywhere and misgive all things to come. Those who trust develop a finer sense for the good, even at the hight cost of blighted hopes. Charmed by the spell of love, faith is, as it were, imposed upon their heart.
Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)
Context: A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease….. No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.
From a letter to John Taylor (June 1798), after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
1790s
Context: A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.
