Dead Reckoning in Literature
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau suggests the following approach to life:
"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds."
In Moby Dick, or, The Whale, Herman Melville states on page 507: "...and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?"
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Famous quotes containing the words dead, reckoning and/or literature:
“O women, kneeling by your altar-rails long hence,
When songs I wove for my beloved hide the prayer,
And smoke from this dead heart drifts through the violet air
And covers away the smoke of myrrh and frankincense;
Bend down and pray for all that sin I wove in song....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“With earth’s first clay they did the last man knead,
There of the last harvest sowed the seed,
And what the first morning of creation wrote,
The last dawn of reckoning shall read.”
—Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883)
“[The] attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)