ben's Quotes

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: ow, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!

    “Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,” Said then the lost Archangel, “this the seat That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid What shall be right: farthest from him is best Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields, Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail, Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor—one ...

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

To the readers of the story of Japan the most interesting episode is that of the introduction and subsequent extirpation of Christianity.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

“Don’t believe it, then!” answered Raskolnikov, with a cold, careless smile. “You were noticing nothing as usual, but I was weighing every word.”

practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of...

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.

was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

If a new translation of Herodotus does not justify itself, it will hardly be justified in a preface