Toccara Joslyn

“In the afternoon they began to watch the creek road. Jack was watching it, too. He whined to go out, and he went all around the stable and the house, stopping to look toward the creek bottoms and show his teeth. The wind almost blew him off his feet.
When he came in he would not lie down. He walked about, and worried. The hair rose on his neck, and flattened, and rose again. He tried to look out of the window, and then whined at the door. But when Ma opened it, he changed his mind and would not go out.
“Jack’s afraid of something,” Mary said.
“Jack’s not afraid of anything, ever!” Laura contradicted.
“Laura, Laura,” Ma said. “It isn’t nice to contradict.”
In a minute Jack decided to go out. He went to see that the cow and calf and Bunny were safe in the stable. And Laura wanted to tell Mary, “I told you so!” She didn’t, but she wanted to.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie

“Whitman’s art: to promise absolute self-revelation and give us fresh gestures of evasion, hesitation, concealment. Better thus, though Walt proclaimed: “I swear I dare not shirk any part of myself.” Stevens learned from Whitman “the intricate evasions of as.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Dintotdeauna cititul însemnase pentru el bucuria cea mai mare și mai statornică, și cu atât mai mult îl pasiona acum, când în povestea triumfului sau a înfrângerilor, a suferințelor sau a bucuriilor altora găsea o evadare din umbra stăruitoare a propriei sale nereușite... în fiecare carte pe care o citea încerca să descopere țelul care ar putea da vieții lui un nou sens.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“This can never be,” and on the other hand, “It must needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions