After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening,. . . I asked myself why I might not be washing some golddaily, though it were only the finest particles,--why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. . . . At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.
It was actually a lot more helpful to have Calvin Hart, a cop, as my template. He was also my technical advisor on Shaft. This time, I kinda got to go to Jersey City with him, and hang around, and watch him interact with other cops, people in the projects, and see what it means to be him. People call him 'Big Daddy' and he's this larger-than-life hero to a lot of people.
Old muleskinners told how the mules were waiting at the shaft when they arrived each morning. They wanted relief from the heat, deerflies and mosquitoes just like the men.
As a woman, I feel women get the shaft all the time.
She Got The Gold Mine, I Got the Shaft.
So in the Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle, stricken with a dart, Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft: With our own feathers, not by others' hands, Are we now smitten.
Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.
One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.
All unwillingly I opened my eyes - then I opened them wider, and lifted my head. The heat, my weariness, were quite forgotten. Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this there was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power. . . they will talk, they will gloat. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
I have found a shaft, going 29 meters [95 feet, approximately] vertically down into the ground, exactly halfway between the Chefren Pyramid and the Sphinx. At the bottom, which was filled with water, we have found a burial chamber with four pillars. In the middle is a large granite sarcophagus which I expect to be the grave of Osiris, the god.
For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who - one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.
The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.
Religion, which true policy befriends, Designed by God to serve man's noblest ends, Is by that old deceiver's subtle play Made the chief party in its own decay, And meets the eagle's destiny, whose breast Felt the same shaft which his own feathers drest.
