The Professor’s House quotes

It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn’t dare quit it.

He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.

If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn’t go to his study at all.

He was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him delight, he got it, if he sold his shirt for it.

By doing without many so-called necessities he had managed to have his luxuries.

He might, for instance, have had a convenient electric drop-light attached to the socket above his writing-table. Preferably he wrote by a faithful kerosene lamp which he filled and tended himself. But sometimes he found that the oilcan in the closet was empty;

He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust—many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well—but his misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him.

If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant.

That ardour could command him. It hadn’t worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.

“Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have bought back the fun I had writing my history, you’d never have got your house. But one couldn’t get that for twenty thousand dollars.

The great pleasures don’t come so cheap.

There is nothing else, thank you.”

“That’s why I kept quiet.

Support can be too able⁠—certainly too fluent.

”

Whoever it was lived in that time, some feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of them, and that he shouldn’t speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a Phyllis or a Nicolette.

It’s a nice idea, reserve about one’s deepest feelings: keeps them fresh.

”

“Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie.

A workroom should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.

”

“Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It’s most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it just an idea—it’s better so. Lots of things are. For the present I’ll plod on here. It’s absurd, but it suits me.

Habit is such a big part of work.

”

And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

“Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a feeling of dignity and purpose.

Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away.

It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.

You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance—you impoverish them.

You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin.

I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance⁠—you impoverish them.

As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing.

It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry.

The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed⁠—it was that which made the difference.

In Nature there is no selection.

She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

Presently the melting music of the tenor’s last aria brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.

His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter held the boy at arm’s length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had been fooled more than once.

He knew that the wonderful seldom holds water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes commonplace by a natural law.

In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their protégé than her husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as “Ma’am.”

He could get out of it without hurting anybody—though he knew Louie would be sorry. He could simply insist that he must work, and that he couldn’t work away from his old study. There were some advantages about being a writer of histories.

The desk was a shelter one could hide behind, it was a hole one could creep into.

When St. Peter told his family of his decision, Louie was disappointed; but he was respectful, and readily conceded that the Professor’s first duty was to his work. Rosamond was incredulous and piqued;

The way would be too long and too fatiguing. Perhaps, for a home-staying man, I’ve lived pretty hard. I wasn’t willing to slight anything—you, or my desk, or my students. And now I seem to be tremendously tired.

One pays, coming or going.

A man has got only just so much in him; when it’s gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon did.” They both laughed. That was an old joke—the Professor’s darkest secret. At the font he had been christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter.

Mrs. O’Brien couldn’t do much for me; she was overworked, poor woman, with a houseful of children. Blake took me down to his room, and he and the old Mexican woman nursed me. He ought to have had boys of his own to look after.

Nature’s full of such substitutions, but they always seem to me sad, even in botany.

I wasn’t able to be about until spring, and then the doctor and Father Duchene said I must give up night work and live in the open all summer.

From the cabin, night and day, you could hear the river, where it made a bend round the foot of the mesa and churned over the rocks.

It was the sort of place a man would like to stay in forever.

I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away bacon and coffee and canned stuff on the shelves behind the cookstove.

It shortened our days, too, considerably. The sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up from behind it.

Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against a sky on fire.

No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. Black thunderstorms used to roll up from behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning.

There must have been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient times: fixed residents, like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.

To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country.

It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day. I liked the winter range better than any place I’d ever been in.

To this day that’s the best I can say for any bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child.

I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in as hard a world as this.

Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge against any of the people who had misused him. He loved to tell about the celebrated people he’d been steward to, and the liberal tips they had given him.

It was, indeed, a very deep valley with gently sloping sides, rugged and rocky, but well grassed. There was a clear trail.

Horses have no sense about making a trail, but you can trust cattle to find the easiest possible path and to take the lowest grades.

The bluish rock and the suntanned grass, under the unusual purple-grey of the sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that the occasional cedars growing beside the boulders looked black that morning.

In stopping to take breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow.

Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep.

It was as still as sculpture—and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition:

In sunlight it was the colour of winter oak-leaves. A fringe of cedars grew along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only living things. Such silence and stillness and repose—immortal repose.

That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.

The falling snowflakes, sprinkling the piñons, gave it a special kind of solemnity. I can’t describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else.

Here and there a cedar log in the ceiling had given way and let the second-story chamber down into the first; except for that, there was little rubbish or disorder.

As Blake remarked, wind and sun are good housekeepers.

This village had never been sacked by an enemy, certainly. Inside the little rooms water jars and bowls stood about unbroken, and yucca-fibre mats were on the floors.

But the really splendid thing about our city, the thing that made it delightful to work there, and must have made it delightful to live there, was the setting.

The town hung like a bird’s nest in the cliff, looking off into the box canyon below, and beyond into the wide valley we called Cow Canyon, facing an ocean of clear air.

A people who had the hardihood to build there, and who lived day after day looking down upon such grandeur, who came and went by those hazardous trails, must have been, as we often told each other, a fine people.

Never any wool, but sheepskins tanned with the fleece on them. They may have been mountain sheep; the mesa was full of them. We talked of shooting one for meat, but we never did.

When a mountain sheep comes out on a ledge hundreds of feet above you, with his trumpet horns, there’s something noble about him⁠—he looks like a priest.

We didn’t want to shoot at them and make them shy. We liked to see them. We shot a wild cow when we wanted fresh meat.

I am inclined to think that your tribe were a superior people. Perhaps they were not so when they first came upon this mesa, but in an orderly and secure life they developed considerably the arts of peace.

There is evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter.

They had an appreciation of comfort, and went even further than that. Their life, compared to that of our roving Navajos, must have been quite complex. There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in what you call the Cliff City.

There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in what you call the Cliff City. Buildings are not grouped like that by pure accident, though convenience probably had much to do with it.

Convenience often dictates very sound design.

“The workmanship on both the wood and stone of the dwellings is good. The shapes and decoration of the water jars and food bowls is better than in any of the existing pueblos I know, better even than the pottery made at Acoma.

“Like you, I feel a reverence for this place.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot.

Your people were cut off here without the influence of example or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for order and security. They built themselves into this mesa and humanized it.”

“If you want to get attention from anybody in Washin’ton,” she said, “ask them to lunch.

People here will do almost anything for a good lunch.

”

Thousands of them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery, who ought to be free.

I remember the city chiefly by those beautiful, hazy, sad sunsets, white columns and green shrubbery, and the monument shaft still pink while the stars were coming out.

I got my interview with the Director of the Smithsonian at last. He gave me his attention, he was interested. He told me to come again in three days and meet Dr.

The wild-currant bushes were in bloom, and where the path climbed the side of a narrow ravine, the scent of them in the sun was so heavy that it made me soft, made me want to lie down and sleep.

I wanted to see and touch everything, like homesick children when they come home.

When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell slantingly through the little twisted piñons—the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it.

I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs.

It was the time of day when everything goes home.

From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper.

In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the piñons along the edge of the top ledges.

The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water.

I remember these things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole.

It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one.

For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion.

I had read of filial piety in the Latin poets, and I knew that was what I felt for this place. It had formerly been mixed up with other motives; but now that they were gone, I had my happiness unalloyed.

I can scarcely hope that life will give me another summer like that one. It was my high tide.

Every morning, when the sun’s rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow, I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything.

Nothing tired me. Up there alone, a close neighbour to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct way.

During those months I didn’t worry much about poor Roddy. I told myself the advertisements would surely get him—I knew his habit of reading newspapers.

There are times when one’s vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down.

Hurrying from my cabin in the morning to the spot in the Cliff City where I studied under a cedar, I used to be frightened at my own heartlessness.

blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage—behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.

Happiness is something one can’t explain. You must take my word for it.

Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself.

Happiness is something one can’t explain. You must take my word for it.

Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself.

Next winter I went back to Pardee and stayed with the O’Briens again, working on the section and studying with Father Duchene and trying to get some word of Blake.

All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance.

His education in France had been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do.

Through Outland’s studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use.

The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination.

To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.

Through Outland’s studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination.

To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.

If the last four volumes of The Spanish Adventurers were more simple and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of Outland. When St.

To St. Peter this plain account was almost beautiful, because of the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say.

If words had cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly.

The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s emotions.

… of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside.

His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him.

All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.

St. Peter went home well satisfied. He did not mention to Dr. Dudley the real reason for his asking for a medical examination. One doesn’t mention such things.

The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea.

Letters came every week from France. Lillian and Louie alternated, so that one or the other got off a letter to him on every fast boat. Louie told him that wherever they went, when they had an especially delightful day, they bought him a present.