...The city fireman-the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the close-pack'd square, The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring, The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line, the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water, The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets-the bringing to bear of the hooks and ladders, and their execution, The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors, if the fire smoulders under them, The crowd with their lit faces, watching-the glare and dense shadows;....
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He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.
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Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming
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A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
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Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,...
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You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
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We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.
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If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
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Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
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How boring is life in the Antarctic? People in one group wintering at the South Pole in the 1960s watched the film 'Cat Ballou' 87 times. People in another, after tiring of the westerns, Disney features and pornographic films on hand, spliced the movies together into their own production and adopted a vocabulary based on their creation that was so strange that relief crews arriving in the spring could barely understand them.
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Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.
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The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.
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Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
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The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
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Acts 17:10:
As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue.
(NIV)
Now the brethren at once sent Paul and Silas away by night to Beroea; and when they arrived, they entered the synagogue of the Jews.
(AMP)
And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews.
(KJV)
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A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
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A good Traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
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