Burnett Stone Quotes

As she stood on the stone floor she looked a very small, odd little black figure, and she felt as small and lost and odd as she looked.

Everything is breaking stones, up to a point.

Not very long after this a very exciting thing happened. Not only Sara, but the entire school, found it exciting, and made it the chief subject of conversation for weeks after it occurred. In one of his letters Captain Crewe told a most interesting story. A friend who had been at school with him when he was a boy had unexpectedly come to see him in India. He was the owner of a large tract of land upon which diamonds had been found, and he was engaged in developing the mines. If all went as was confidently expected, he would become possessed of such wealth as it made one dizzy to think of; and because he was fond of the friend of his school days, he had given him an opportunity to share in this enormous fortune by becoming a partner in his scheme. This, at least, was what Sara gathered from his letters. It is true that any other business scheme, however magnificent, would have had but small attraction for her or for the schoolroom; but "diamond mines" sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very spiteful about it, and told Jessie that she didn't believe such things as diamond mines existed.

it bubbled over and round stones. He saw birds come and dip their heads to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away. It seemed like a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness seem deeper. The valley was very, very still. As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the valley itself. He wondered if he were going to sleep, but he was not. He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots growing so close to the stream that its leaves were wet and at these he found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things years ago. He

There are words for things that are not here; the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, the sea— so many words scattered around this city hacked in stone and scrawled on skin and traced on frail leaves.

Given the language and cultural barriers, the tests involved sorting items into groups. The researchers decided that sorting items into categories (tools, animals, items made of stone, wood, and so on), something that required abstract thinking and processing, was more intelligent. But the Kpelle always sorted things into function (things I can eat, things I can wear, things I can dig with). This was deemed ‘less’ intelligent, but clearly the Kpelle disagreed. These are people who live off the land, so sorting things into arbitrary categories would be a meaningless and wasteful activity, something a ‘fool’ would do. As well as being an important lesson in not judging people by your own preconceptions (and maybe about doing better groundwork before beginning an experiment), this example shows how the very concept of intelligence is seriously affected by the environment and preconceptions of society.