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:
“Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to enquire—in the midst of myriads of the living & the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“He wasn’t off a mere degree;
His reckoning was off a sea.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)