I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here stands the row of enormous stelæ that have furnished the date that links the Mayan calendar to ours. These stones standing g...rimly in line, swelling with the enormous strength of their halfobliterated carvings, still give you, through all the confusion of races and empires long dead, of languages and writings that can never be understood, a feeling of serene order and form... so that after seeing them, the railroad and the guns and the overseers and the loading sheds and the uptodate malaria hospital, all the carefully organized machinery for efficiently squeezing...the sweat and blood of the yellow brown and white mongrel race of workers who live in the rows of company shacks...seems feeble and flabby, not organization at all, not order at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent....
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs. The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;... If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His white head hung out like a carpet bag and his crotch turned blue as a blood blister,... and Godfather death, as it is written, put a finger on his back for the big blackout, the big no.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't,... A brother's murder. Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will; My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, And like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother's blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »