Another piece of advice: when you proofread cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: The man sat on the grass, because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully. The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously. And then one other thing; you are lyrical by nature. The timber of your soul is soft. If you were a composer you would avoid writing marches. It is unnatural for your talent to curse, shout, taunt, denounce with rage. Therefore, you'll understand if I advise you, in proofreading, to eliminate the sons of bitches, curs, and flea-bitten mutts that appear here and there on the pages of Life.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
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That's a valiant flea that dares eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.
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a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat
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A flea and a fly in a flu; were imprisoned so what could they do? Said the flea 'let us fly'; said the fly' let us flee'; so they flew through a flaw in the flu.
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A dog who attends a flea circus most likely will steal the whole show.
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A fly and a flea in a flue Were imprisoned, so what could they do? Said the Flea, Let us fly! Said the Fly, Let us flee! So they fled through a flaw in the flue.
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The fatter the flea the leaner the dog.
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Life would be a perpetual flea hunt if a man were obliged to run down all the innuendoes, inveracities, and insinuations and misrepresentations which are uttered against him.
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Man is stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.
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Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens.
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