Word: coffin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forced the acceptance of his ideas: the duty of the modern novelist was to be "true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women"; such romanticists as Scott and Dickens were "dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to air." Second Deadly Silas. Howells' novels were written in a prose that both friends such as Twain and detractors such as H. L. Mencken admitted to be superb; and they were written about subjects that mattered-the hardening caste strata...
...laughs. Men die on barbed wire and a hand sticks out of the water in the bottom of a shell hole. ("It seemed to be waving at us cheerfully. Rollo shook hands with it.") This mingling of humor and horror is like a clown tap-dancing on a coffin, but Jack is skill ful enough to get away with...
...Williams' real life, starts with a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables: Poet Sidney Lanier, some Tennessee Indian fighters, an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis Xavier. More prosaically, his father was a salesman for International Shoe Co. "C.C." (for Cornelius Coffin) Williams was a gruff, aggressive man with a booming voice who was happiest, says Tennessee, "playing poker with men and drinking." His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was petite, vivacious, genteel and prim; she nourished rather illusory memories of a grand and gracious Southern past, of going to dances in Natchez...
Moses, who lived about five centuries after the Middle Kingdom ended, was "brought up in Egyptian wisdom," argues Professor John A. Wilson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. "So the philosophies contained in the Coffin Texts quite clearly could have been known to him and to the children of Israel...
...Case, Poetic. Bruinsma himself doubts that there is much relation between the Coffin Text teachings and Judaic morality. But scholars find a delight all its own in the limpid poetry contained in the spells, which suggests something of the sophistication and richness of Egyptian theology. Even Ecclesiastes has little to match the curious beauty of Coffin Text No. 269: "I made the four winds that every man might breathe thereof like his fellow in his time. I made the great inundation that the poor man might have rights like the nobles. I made every man like his fellow...