And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to
live. John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.
You exert all your puny strength to struggle to
live. Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as a butterfly resting there.
"We don't know the way to
live here," said Pyotr Oblonsky.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to
live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.
(Pierre's modesty made him correct himself) "to
live for others, only now have I understood all the happiness of life.
'So that is how I
live. I always complain and am always dissatisfied, but thank God the grandchildren are all nice and healthy, and we can still
live.
'But if you go straight along this road for a year, you will reach a hut where my father
lives, and possibly he may be able to tell you.'
"If that is the case, Dorothy, perhaps you'd better go and
live in the Emerald City.
"I think, sister, we need not keep Miss Lee any longer, when Fanny goes to
live with you."
He told me I should go home with him, and
live with him, if I pleased, as long as I lived; that as to his father, he knew nobody, and would never so much as guess at me.
'Did not you ask it for anything?' said the wife, 'we
live very wretchedly here, in this nasty dirty pigsty; do go back and tell the fish we want a snug little cottage.'
Of what worth are your courage and cunning, when you have no seed to make your courage and cunning
live again?"