Niagara Falls Short Quotes

Human language falls short of expressing all that He is, even as a thimble lacks capacity to hold Niagara Falls.

It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste.

On May 17, 1913, Domingo Rosillo and Agustín Parlá attempted the first international flights to Latin America, by trying to fly their airplanes from Key West to Havana. At 5:10 a.m., Rosillo departed from Key West and flew for 2 hours, 30 minutes and 40 seconds before running out of gas. He had planned to land at the airfield at Camp Columbia in Havana, but instead managed to squeak in at the camp’s shooting range, thereby still satisfactorily completing the flight. Parlá left Key West at 5:57 in the morning. Just four minutes later, at 6:01 a.m., he had to carefully turn back to the airstrip he had just left, since the aircraft didn’t properly respond to his controls. Parlá said, “It would not let me compensate for the wind that blew.” When he returned to Key West, he discovered that two of the tension wires to the aircraft’s elevators were broken. Two days later, Parlá tried again and left Key West, carrying the Cuban Flag his father had received from José Martí. This time he fell short and had to land at sea off the Cuban coast near Mariel. Sailors from the Cuban Navy rescued him from his seaplane. Being adventuresome, while attending the Curtiss School of Aviation in 1916, Parlá flew over Niagara Falls. In his honor, the Cuban flag was hoisted and the Cuban national anthem was played. The famous Cuban composer, pianist, and bandleader, Antonio M. Romeu, composed a song in his honor named “Parlá over the Niagara” and Agustín Parlá became known as the “Father of Cuban Aviation.

the water charged into the valley at a velocity and depth comparable to that of the Niagara River as it reaches Niagara Falls. Or to put it another way, the bursting of the South Fork dam was about like turning Niagara Falls into the valley for thirty-six minutes. A short distance below

Near the end of the flood, weather forecasters began tallying up just how much rain had fallen in the Dayton area alone. One estimate making the rounds shortly afterward was that during the four days it rained on Dayton, the amount of water dumping over the city and passing through the streets equaled the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a four-day period.

This is, indeed, a terrible indictment of so-called progress. The fictional aspects of Travels with Charley are noticeable on most pages, the chief of these being the use of dialogue—perhaps the most obvious of fictional techniques employed by this master novelist. Steinbeck offers a sequence of human encounters, creating characters and dialogue as a true novelist would. For instance, when he crosses the Canadian border near Niagara Falls, he has a lovely, amusing exchange with the customs officer that could easily sit in the text of a short story. Steinbeck had no tape recorder, so it’s made-up speech, based on real conversation. Nevertheless the dialogue goes on for pages, and there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Discrete scene gives way to discrete scene in the mode of picaresque fiction invented by Cervantes, and it seems fitting that the driver of a truck called Rocinante should inhabit a similarly shaped narrative