"The Greater Journey"

[fiefoe]

David McCullough admits that this is a pleasurable book to do research for, since so many of his subjects left eloquent accounts of their journeys.

• There was always the possibility of "a little pleasure concealed in the bottom of the cup."
• His stomach and spleen had "got entirely out of trim".
• “Prenez garde!” shouts the captain as the sea strikes, and in the twinkling of an eye everything is seized and held up to wait for the lurch, in attitudes that would puzzle the pencil of Johnson to exaggerate.
• Thousands of saints and angels there stood in silence, with voiceless harps; or spread forever their moveless wings - half issuing in bold relief from mimic clouds of stone.
• I love to study a place teeming with historical recollections, under this light; leaving the sites of memorable scenes to issue, one by one, out of the grey mass of gloom, as time gives up its facts from the obscurity of ages.
• "Utility with all her arithmetic very often miscalculates," he wrote.
• (Taglioni's) face is most strangely interesting, not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half-retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of a young girl just "out" in a circle of high fashion.
• One of my favorites was Rembrandt. I always did admire the gorgeous and solemn mysteries of his coloring. Rembrandt is like Hawthorne. He chooses simple and everyday objects and so arranges light and shadow as to give them a somber richness and a mysterious gloom... The House of Seven Gables is a succession of Rembrandt pictures, done in words instead of oils. Now this pleases us because our life really is a haunted one; the simplest thing in it is a mystery, the invisible world always lies round us like a shadow, and therefore this dreamy golden gleam of Rembrandt meets somewhat in our inner consciousness to which it corresponds.
• Like Shakespeare, (Rubens) forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellences.