Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town LifeLoosely connected tales in which a young reporter named George Willard probes the hopes, dreams, and fears of the solitary people in a small Midwestern town at the turn of the 19th century. |
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alleyway arms arose Art Wilson banker's wife became began Bentley farm chair county seat cried Curtis Hartman darkness David Doctor Parcival Doctor Reefy door dream Enoch Robinson ERNEST BOYD eyes face father felt fields floor George Willard girl gone grew hands Hardy house head Helen White horse Jesse Bentley John Hardy Kate Swift kissed laughed lived looked Louise Main Street marriage married Mary Hardy Medina County mind morning mother muttered ness never night Ohio pockets quiet road Seth Richmond Sherwood Anderson shoulders silence son's room staring stood stopped story street of Winesburg talked tall tell Theodore Dreiser thing thought Tom King took town trees trembled tried turned voice waited walked wanted Wash Williams whispered wife Willard House window Wine Creek Winesburg Eagle Wing Biddlebaum woman women words
Popular passages
Page 4 - That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
Page 20 - Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
Page 168 - Hard, but leaned forward and stared into the darkness as though seeing a vision. "I ran away to the country to be cured, but I am not cured. There is a reason." He turned to look at the child who sat up very straight on her father's knee and returned the look. The stranger touched Tom Hard on the arm. "Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted," he said. "There is something else. I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean....
Page 12 - Biddlebaum sprang to his feet and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Tears came to his eyes. "I must be getting along home. I can talk no more with you," he said nervously. Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and across a meadow, leaving George Willard perplexed and frightened upon the grassy slope. With a shiver of dread the boy arose and went along the road toward town. "I'll not ask him about his hands," he thought, touched by the memory of the terror...
Page 297 - I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt. In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night of the late fall. Farm horses jogged away along lonely country roads pulling their portion of weary people. Clerks began to bring samples of goods in off the sidewalks and lock the doors of stores. In the Opera House a crowd had gathered to see a show and further down Main Street the fiddlers, their instruments tuned, sweated and worked...
Page 36 - Sitting in a chair beside his mother he began to talk. "I'm going to get out of here," he said. "I don't know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going away." The woman in the chair waited and trembled. An impulse came to her. "I suppose you had better wake up," she said. "You think that? You will go to the city and make money, eh? It will be better for you, you think, to be a business man, to be brisk and smart and alive?" She waited and trembled. The son shook his head. "I suppose I can't...
Page 13 - He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men. And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders...
Page v - TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER EMMA SMITH ANDERSON Whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives, this book is dedicated.
Page 246 - Richmond will remember the incident quite vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives. But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal who worked on...
Page 182 - His voice dropped and he began to whisper. "I did v tO not understand," he said. "What I took to be trial of my soul was only a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit. God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling naked on a bed. Do you know Kate Swift? Although she may not be aware of it...