Quotations

«The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.»

«Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.»

«It was the love of love,the love that swallows up all else,a grateful love,a love of nature, of people,of animals,a love engenderinggentleness and goodnessthat moved meand that I saw in you.»

«HIBERNATE, v.i. To pass the winter season in domestic seclusion. There have been many singular popular notions about the hibernation of various animals. Many believe that the bear hibernates during the whole winter and subsists by mechanically sucking its paws. It is admitted that it comes out of its retirement in the spring so lean that it had to try twice before it can cast a shadow. Three or four centuries ago, in England, no fact was better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in the mud at the bottom of their brooks, clinging together in globular masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom and account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious significance; but this view was strenuously opposed by that eminent authority, Bishop Kip, who did not wish any honors denied to the memory of the Founder of his family.»

«Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.»

«I hate a man who swallows it [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.»

«The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.»

«Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all?s fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he?s no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he?s neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach?d, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and tho? you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men?s lives, which he guggles down like mother?s milk.»

«All futurity seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled; Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage.»