英文名著经典段落欣赏

2017-02-28

英文名著经典段落欣赏

Me and Writing

This was the summer that I think I became a writer. I was thirteen years old. I wore steel-rimmed glasses and I was a very solemn boy. Not that I was sad, but I simply was payingattention. I'd been given a typewriter by my Uncle George, when he got an electric. He gaveme his old Underwood typewriter and I set it up in the basement. I had a secret place underthe stairs behind a stack of sheet rock. I sat in there and wrote where my parents could notsee me because they were worried, you know, that I didn't go outside. And they believed in theillusion of a balanced life, you know, you do a little bit of this, you do a little bit of that. I justwanted to do one thing. I just wanted to find things to write about.

I liked to write about tornadoes: Tornadoes, which come out of a peaceful summer day inthe Midwest. And the sky's blue and then suddenly it's dark as night and this great snake-likecloud comes slithering across the landscape, smashing houses at random, destroyingthis one, leaving this standing. I liked that idea.

I wrote a story, a sort of autobiographical story, about a family from New York, amicrobiologist and his actress wife, and their son, who looked, and walked, and talked, andthought, and felt exactly like me. I sat in the backseat and they were driving across theMidwest, and they forgot me... at a gas station. We stopped for a rest stop... and they forgotme, and they drove away. I walked up the road that they had driven and suddenly the skyturned dark and... a tornado came up and it picked me up and it carried me and dropped me,uninjured, in the yard of a 1sanctified 1Brethren family. I knocked on the door and awoman in a white 1satin gown holding a flaming 1torch came out and asked me what Iwanted. And I was going to tell them that I had to leave to look for my parents and then thedog spoke to me. The dog said, "Stay." So, I stayed. But still, I missed the life of 1glamourthat I had known on New York's 1exclusive Upper West Side. I love to write stories like that.

I sat there at my Underwood typewriter, but I wished that something real would happen.

That was the summer that my cousin, Helen-Marie, came to stay with us suddenly. She wasseventeen. She was four years older than I and I'd always admired her. She was lovelier thanthe rest of us. The rest of us had our family's looks; we had 1homely faces and she waspretty. She had 1blonde hair, a rarity in our family.

Then I wrote a story about her; about a girl who is cooking lunch at home one day and awoman in a white satin dress holding a flaming torch bursts in through the door, and it startlesthe girl so much that she drops the 1cast iron skillet on her dog and the dog bites her andshe gets an 1incurable blood disease from this. Doctors give her two weeks to live, andthen, on top of everything, a tornado comes in and it blows the roof off the house and it2impales four blades of grass in her side. And there's something on that grass that curesthat blood disease. Medical science has never seen anything like it. She's cured. She comeshome. And that night the dog 2scratches on her door, and the dog says, "Aren't youcurious to know what it was on the grass that cured that blood disease?" I sort of liked thestory.

英文名著经典段落鉴赏

The big rocks

One day an expert in time management was speaking to a group of business students and, todrive home a point, used an illustration those students will never forget. As he stood in frontof the group of high-powered over-achievers he said, "Okay, time for a quiz.” Then he pulledout a one-gallon, wide-mouthed Mason jar and set it on the table in front of him. He thenproduced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar.When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, "Is the jarfull?" Everyone in the class said, "Yes."

He replied, "Really?"

He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel, then dumped some gravel inand shook the jar causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the space betweenthe big rocks.

He asked the group once more, "Is the jar full?"

By this time the class was on to him. "Probably not," one of them answered.

"Good!" he replied.

He reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand inthe jar and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more heasked the question, "Is the jar full?"

"No!" the class shouted.

Once again he said, "Good!"

Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim.Then he looked at the class and asked, "What is the point of this illustration?" One eagerstudent raised her hand and said, "The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you tryreally hard you can always fit some more things in!"

"Good answer, but no," the speaker replied, "that's not my point. The truth this illustrationteaches us is: If you don't put the big rocks in first, you'll never get them in at all. What are the'big rocks" in your life? In my life they are my children... my wife... my loved ones... myeducation... my dreams... charities and worthy causes... teaching or mentoring others... doingthings that I love... time for myself... my health... Remember to put these BIG ROCKS in first oryou'll never get them in at all."

If you sweat the little stuff then you'll fill your life with little things to worry about that don'treally matter, and you'll never have the real quality time you need to spend on the big,important stuff ：the big rocks.

英文名著经典段落大全

What Is Happiness?

"Are you happy?" I asked my brother, Ian, one day.

"Yes. No. It depends on what you mean," he said.

"Then tell me," I said, "when was the last time you think you were happy?"

"April 1967," he said.

It served me right for putting a serious question to someone who has joked his way through life. But Ian's answer reminded me that when we think about happiness, we usually think of something extraordinary, a pinnacle of sheer delight. And those pinnacles seem to get rarer the older we get.

For a child, happiness has a magical quality. I remember making hide-outs in newly cut hay, playing cops and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at such peaks of pleasure as winning a race or getting a new bike is unreserved.

In the teenage years, the concept of happiness changes. Suddenly it's conditional on such things as excitement, love, popularity and whether that zit will clear up before a prom night. I can still feel the agony of not being invited to a party that almost everyone else was going to. But I also recall the ecstasy of being plucked from obscurity at another event to dance with a John Travolta look-alike.

In adulthood the things that bring profound joy - birth, love, marriage - also bring responsibility and the risk of loss. Love may not last, loved ones die. For adults, happiness is complicated.

My dictionary defines happy as "lucky" or "fortunate", but I think a better definition of happiness is "the capacity for enjoyment". The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It's easy to overlook the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to live where we please, even good health.

I added up my little moments of pleasure yesterday. First there was sheer bliss when I shut the last lunchbox and had the house to myself. Then I spent an 1uninterrupted morning writing, which I love. When the kids came home, I enjoyed their noise after the quiet of the day.

You never know where happiness will turn up next. When I asked friends what makes them happy, some mentioned 1seemingly 1insignificant moments. "I hate shopping," one friend said. "But there's this clerk who always chats and really cheers me up."

Another friend loves the telephone. "Every time it rings, I know someone is thinking about me."

We all experience moments like these. Too few of us register them as happiness.

While happiness may be more complex for us, the solution is the same as ever. Happiness isn't about what happens to us; it's about how we perceive what happens to us. It's the 1knack of finding a positive for every negative, and viewing a 1set-back as a challenge. It's not wishing for what we don't have, but enjoying what we do possess.

英文名著经典段落赏析

A Lesson for Living

"Everything happens for the best," my mother said whenever I faced disappointment. "If youcarry on, one day something good will happen. And you'll realize that it wouldn't havehappened if not for that previous disappointment."

Mother was right, as I discovered after graduating from college in 1932. I had decided to try fora job in radio, then work my way up to sports announcer. I hitchhiked to Chicago andknocked on the door of every station - and got turned down every time.

In one studio, a kind lady told me that big stations couldn't risk hiring an inexperiencedperson. "Go out in the sticks and find a small station that'll give you a chance," she said.

I thumbed home to Dixon, Illinois. While there was no radio-announcing jobs in Dixon, myfather said Montgomery Ward had opened a store and wanted a local athlete to manage itssports department. Since Dixon was where I had played high school football, I applied. The jobsounded just right for me. But I wasn't hired.

My disappointment must have shown. "Everything happens for the best," Mom reminded me.Dad offered me the car to job hunt. I tried WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa. The programdirector, a wonderful Scotsman named Peter MacArthur, told me they had already hired anannouncer.

As I left his office, my frustration boiled over. I asked aloud, "How can a fellow get to be asports announcer if he can't get a job in a radio station?"

I was waiting for the elevator when I heard MacArthur calling, "What was that you said aboutsports? Do you know anything about football?" Then he stood me before a microphone andasked me to broadcast an imaginary game.

On my way home, as I have many times since, I thought of my mother's words: "If you carryon, one day something good will happen. Something wouldn't have happened if not for thatprevious disappointment."

I often wonder what direction my life might have taken if I'd gotten the job at MontgomeryWard.

英文名著经典段落欣赏

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