Polish Quotes - page 4
One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies - coal, iron, steam - a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements - agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow - not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs - but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he - American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war.
Henry Adams
Most motor-cars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and petrol and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday. Smoke comes out of the back of them and horn-squawks out of the front, and they have white lights like big eyes in front, and red lights behind. And that is about that - just motor-cars, tin boxes on wheels for running about in.
But some motorcars - mine, for instance, and perhaps yours - are different. If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don't scratch their paint and bang their doors, if you fill them up and pump them up when they need it, of you keep them clean and polish and out the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you MAY find, that they become almost like persons - MORE than just ordinary persons - MAGICAL PERSONS!!!
Ian Fleming