A gathering of notes and quotes from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau.
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever.
– Henry David Thoreau, from “Monday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant…Most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead.
– Henry David Thoreau, from “Monday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (location 283-284 of 882)
Herein is the tragedy: that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.
– Henry David Thoreau, from “Monday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (location 283 of 882)
“I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead un-kind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors.”"
– Henry David Thoreau, from “Monday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (location 282 of 882)
i’m paddling my way through Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, though it is definitely taking me more than a week.
I have this Library of America edition, but I’m actually mainly reading it on my phone - Standard Ebooks edition, added to the iOS Books app. The LoA edition has reference notes, so I look at it when I can, but I actually like reading on my phone.