In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings nei...ther has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your w...ords and you are free.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women born at the turn of the century have been conditioned not to speak openly of their wedding nights. Of other nights in bed wi...th other men they speak not at all. Today a woman having bedded with a great general feels free to tell us that in bed the general could not present arms. Women of my generation would have spared the great general the revelation of this failure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of se...nsitivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The young ... look into visages dull-eyed, long-toothed, wattle-necked, and chop-fallen, something they have never been and which ...they cannot imagine ever being.... If it occurs to a young person, looking at us, that this is the direction in which he himself travels, how can he forgive, let alone bear the sight of, us, who constantly bring him the bad news of our own faces, bitter signposts pointing to his own destination?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You... become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day's tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »