A Quote by Alice Morse Earle
From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.
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Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.
I don't know why Alzheimer's was allowed to steal so much of my father before releasing him into the arms of death. But I know that at his last moment, when he opened his eyes, eyes that had not opened for many, many days, and looked at my mother, he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love.
While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.
The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
Oh, I was sobbing, like, so bad when baby arrived. Like, I don't think people have seen a man sobbing like that. It was awful, but in the most joyful way. I mean, I was picking that baby up and putting him on me. And the baby, like, halfway opened his eyes and it just made me feel like, 'Oh my god, this is the most incredible thing.'
My father never feared death. He never saw it as an ending. I don't know why Alzheimer's was allowed to steal so much of my father before releasing him into the arms of death. But I know that at his last moment, when he opened his eyes - - eyes that had not opened for many, many days - - and looked at my mother, he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love.
Men of New England, I hold you to the doctrines of liberty which ye inherit from your Puritan forefathers.
Some friends of mine in the class ahead of me in college were auditioning for graduate school in New York, and then a few of them got into Juilliard, and it sort of opened my eyes. I didn't really know anything about it, but it opened my eyes to a possible next step after school, where I could just deepen my knowledge and also not be responsible for life and stay in school.
I finished my studies in England, I opened my studio in London, and the first one-man exhibit I had on Bond Street, which was opened by the Austrian ambassador.
The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.
I grew up in New England. I think I was brought up with the Puritan ethic: that if you worked really hard in life, then good would come to you. The harder you work, the luckier you get. I've come to believe that it's the smarter you work, the better.
In the early days of the New England colonies, no more embarrassing or hampering condition, no greater temporal ill, could befall any adult Puritan than to be unmarried.
Old Dan must have known he was dying. Just before he drew his last breath, he opened his eyes and looked at me. Then with one last sigh, and a feeble thump of his tail, his friendly gray eyes closed forever.
A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth. As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky.
For me, my layer came so organically, 'oh, he went and got neck surgery,' and you see a bit of real life with the baby, my wife and home life. It opened up this whole new insight into me for the viewer.
Sometimes bleak is good. Sometimes bleak is necessary. Some part of life is always bleak.
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