Unit 1: Selection Vocabulary 2

For instance, when I come back to the inn during the course of the morning to write up the necessary orders, these gentlemen are just sitting down to breakfast.

But that would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious, because during his five years’ service Gregor hadn’t been sick even once.

Gregor wanted to answer in detail and explain everything, but in these circumstances he confined himself to saying, ‘Yes, yes, thank you mother. I’m getting up right away.’

Instead of these, however, he had only many small limbs which were incessantly moving with very different motions and which, in addition, he was unable to control.

However, after a similar effort, while he lay there again sighing as before and once again saw his small limbs fighting one another, if anything worse than before, and didn’t see any chance of imposing quiet and order on this arbitrary movement, he told himself again that he couldn’t possibly remain in bed and that it might be the most reasonable thing to sacrifice everything if there was even the slightest hope of getting himself out of bed in the process.

But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It’s hard to get your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up.

I am not even going to describe the expression on her face when she first notices the blind dog sitting behind the wheel of her car—just what I can see through the one-inch picture frame, just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her.

We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.

I tell this story again because it usually makes a dent in the tremendous sense of being overwhelmed that my students experience.

Sometimes it actually gives them hope, and hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.

For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the Moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the Moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall...on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun...then we must be bold…

And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.