The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley. Significant Sentences 14

Significant sentences from Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower, a collection of Eiseley's essays on nature and humanity's relationship to it.

Title of Essay: "Walden: Thoreau's Unfinished Business."

"...looking is in itself the business of art." p. 236.

Jung: "Technics and science have indeed conquered the world, but whether the soul has gained thereby is another matter." p. 236.

"Thoreau saw nature as another civilization, a thing of vaster laws and vagaries than that encompassed by the human mind." p. 235.

"The universe was in motion, nothing was fixed." p. 236 .

"Modern man...could not imagine so much as exists." p. 237.

"Mind prints are what the first man left, mind prints will be what the last man leaves, even if it is only a beer can dropped rolling from the last living hand." p. 239.

"Thoreau was a stay-at-home who traveled much in his mind...." p. 241.

"Seeing is not the same thing as understanding." p. 241.

"One man sees with indifference a leaf fall; another with the vision of Thoreau invokes the whole of that nostalgic world which we call autumn." p. 241.

"One man sees a red fox running through a shaft of sunlight and lifts a rifle; another lays a restraining hand upon his companion's arm and says, 'Please. There goes the last wild gaiety in the world. Let it live. Let it run.' "

"He transmutes the cricket's song in an autumn night to an aching void in the heart; snowflakes become the flying years." p. 241.

"Only man is capable of comprehending all he was and all that he has failed to be." p. 241.

Thoreau: "Find eternity in each moment." p. 242.

Thoreau: "There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living." p. 245.

Thoreau: "I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time." p. 245.

Thoreau: "I grew in those seasons like corn in the night." p. 245.

"A hundred years after his [Thoreau's] death people were still trying to understand what he was about. They were still trying to get both eyes open." p. 248.

Reflections: From Our Town: Emily: "I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back--up the hill--to my grave. But first--wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mamma and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking...and Mamma's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Stage Manager: "No. The saints and poets, maybe--they do some."