With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.
They have a crystalline sense of right and wrong; it disappears when they walk out the door with their M.B.A.
The crafty person is always in danger; and when they think they walk in the dark, all their pretenses are transparent.
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
Nothing of the kind; they do all these things in their houses and sheds, with common charcoal fires, and a quantity of straw to stop up the crevices in the doors and windows.
Suffering has roused them from the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we loved were merely happy shadows.
They're like sleeping in a soft bed. Easy to get into and hard to get out of.
All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.
No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground.
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.