22
Yellow highlight | Page: 2
Magnanimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing …
Yellow highlight | Page: 19
And so I came along in time to know the end of the age of steamboating. I would learn later that there had been other ages of the river that I had arrived too late to know but that I could read about and learn to imagine.
Yellow highlight | Page: 76
My agreement with myself was that if I was going to go, I ought to be willing to go by my own means, which is to say by foot.
Yellow highlight | Page: 83
And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape.
Yellow highlight | Page: 83
The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly. I had almost no sooner broke my leash than I had hit the wall.
Yellow highlight | Page: 94
But it’s a fact that knowledge comes to barbers, just as stray cats come to milking barns.
Yellow highlight | Page: 103
Anyhow, I spent that night in the barber chair, wearing all the clothes I had and several sheets of a newspaper, and by daylight I was cold enough.
Yellow highlight | Page: 182
But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish. Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a “landowner.” He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.
Yellow highlight | Page: 183
And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think. You couldn’t see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors.
Yellow highlight | Page: 183
The time was going to come—it is clear enough now—when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers. It is hard, too, to
Yellow highlight | Page: 185
The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock. The farm would have no more livestock than it could carry without strain. No more land would be plowed for grain crops than could be fertilized with manure from the animals. No more grain would be grown than the animals could eat. Except in case of unexpected surpluses or deficiencies, the farm did not sell or buy livestock feed. “I mean my grain and hay to leave my place on foot,” Athey liked to say. This was a conserving principle; it strictly limited both the amount of land that would be plowed and the amount of supplies that would have to be bought. Athey did not save money at the expense of his farm
Yellow highlight | Page: 185
or his family, but he looked upon spending it as a last resort; he spent no more than was necessary, and he hated debt.
Yellow highlight | Page: 204
History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever,
Yellow highlight | Page: 205
even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.
Yellow highlight | Page: 205
And so there we all were on a little wave of time lifting up to eternity, and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it. How could we? It is a mystery, for we are eternal beings living in time.
Yellow highlight | Page: 217
Carter Keith followed the rules that he handed on to his son: He made use of all the daylight he had and would ask no man to do anything that he would not do himself.
Yellow highlight | Page: 289
For him himself, I sort of felt sorry. But he was not there as himself. He was the man across the desk, the one I had so dreaded to meet again. But this time, I thought, it was not a desk but a whole building full of sub-assistant-secretaries. He did not speak for himself but for a man behind a desk who spoke for a man behind another desk, who also did not speak for himself.
Yellow highlight | Page: 310
think of its parallel, never-meeting banks, which yet never part.
Yellow highlight | Page: 312
He had perceived, with the help of some instruction from his elders, that there were people in the world who proposed that he should work hard for his money, and that they would then take it from him easily. He did not consent to this. He was, as a result, said to be “tight,” which meant that he never spent any money he didn’t have to spend, he rarely bought anything new, and he had a pronounced leaning toward any good thing that he could buy cheap or get free.
Yellow highlight | Page: 313
The Branches seemed uninterested in getting somewhere and making something of themselves. What they liked was making something of nearly nothing.
Yellow highlight | Page: 332
The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people’s freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. “Buy a car,” it says, “and be free. Buy a boat and be free. Buy a beer and be free.” Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?
Yellow highlight | Page: 356
Man in the Well.