A Whole Street of Houses, Stirred With A Spoon

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“ And by this time they were come up to the great iron gates in front of the house; and Tom stared through them at the rhododendrons and azaleas, which were all in flower; and then at the house itself, and wondered how many chimneys there were in it, and how long ago it was built, and what was the man’s name that built it, and whether he got much money for his job? These last were very difficult questions to answer. For Harthover had been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different styles, and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon.” —The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley. Ch.1 (1863)

No Surrender

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"During the previous winter I had become ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whisper of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, 'slow down. You're not as young as you once were.' And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-individualism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap . . .

. . . I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock of missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for small gain in yardage."

(Steinbeck, "Travels With Charley," pp. 19-20)

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

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