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:
“This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“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)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)