Strokes

Famous quotes containing the word strokes:

    While we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper’s axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude.... When we told Joe of this, he exclaimed, “By George, I’ll bet that was a moose! They make a noise like that.” These sounds affected us strangely, and by their very resemblance to a familiar one, where they probably had so different an origin, enhanced the impression of solitude and wildness.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    It was the bad ax-helve someone had sold me
    “Made on machine,” he said, plowing the grain
    With thick thumbnail to show how it ran
    Across the handle’s long-drawn serpentine,
    Like the two strokes across a dollar sign.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Reprehension is a kind of middle thing betwixt admonition and correction: it is sharpe admonition, but a milde correction. It is rather to be used because it may be a meanes to prevent strokes and blowes, especially in ingenuous and good natured children. [Blows are] the last remedy which a parent can use: a remedy which may doe good when nothing else can.
    William Gouge, Puritan writer. As quoted in The Rise and Fall of Childhood by C. John Sommerville, ch. 11 (rev. 1990)