What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dusty road, now in... a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include "Capital Lawes" providing a death penalty for any c...hild over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When society comes to value one child more truly, we shall have, for every community, a country homestead where that child can go,... who needs special encouragement. It will not be a penal place, nor even a place of reform, but it will be held out, rather, as a dear delight and a reward. But when society values the child enough, and realises what the child means to the State, and what the home means to the child, it will provide even better, for then the child will have, in its own home, all that a home should give.... There will be safety. There will be the chance to be well, to be pure; room to grow and breathe in; the sacred privacy of the home circle--all those things that are the birthright of every child. And there will be, in some way, beauty, to which the soul of the child naturally turns, as does a plant to the light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had reconciled myself to a life without marriage or children for the sake of my career. And then my brothers got married. I real...ized I didn't even have a home, that in the future I couldn't do politics when I had to ask permission from their wives as to whether I could use the dining room or the telephone. I couldn't rent a home because a woman living on her own can be suspected of all kinds of scandalous associations. So keeping in mind that many people in Pakistan looked to me, I decided to make a personal sacrifice in what I thought would be, more or less, a loveless marriage, a marriage of convenience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer... cans litter the living room. The family isn't likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn't remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me! I want a ship that's westward bound to plow the rolling sea,... To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can think of many amusing parallels. For example, "the Borough of ... announces: Miss Jones, the splendid principal of our gramm...ar school, has been offered the position of cook and housekeeper by the family next door, and so we feel obliged to dismiss her and make room for one of the young girls just graduated from training college. Miss Jones may not care to be a cook but since she has that privilege we don't think it right for her to continue to teach, valuable as her services are to the community." Or, "the Educational Committee of ... Borough has adopted a rule to employ no more men teachers who have vegetable gardens, and to notify those men now in its employ who possess vegetable gardens or are contemplating acquiring one that they will be dismissed. We are actuated by the following reasons: (1) The place of a man with a vegetable garden is at home working in his garden. (2) We feel, as a general rule, that a man with a vegetable garden will, to some extent, suffer in his efficiency as a teacher. We have no evidence of this; in fact the vegetable gardeners whom we are about to dismiss are among our best teachers, but nevertheless, we feel that as a general policy our rule is sound from an educational standpoint. (3) A man with a garden will not starve. Therefore, it is unfair to continue paying him a salary as a teacher while men who have no vegetable gardens are waiting for posts [ellipses in original].LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our home has been nothing but a play-room. I've been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child. And the childre...n have been my dolls in their turn. I liked it when you came and played with me, just as they liked it when I came and played with them. That's what our marriage has been, Torvald.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white... in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home. How should there be Black poets in America?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ... like being successful. I somehow always knew that I would succeed. I had a great sense of destiny from the time I was very y...oung.... When I was only about five or six years old, I was standing with my mother in the kitchen at home in Long Beach. I told her flat out that when I grew up I was going to be the best at something. She just smiled and kept peeling potatoes or whatever it was she was doing. She said, "Yes, dear; yes, of course, dear," as if I had simply said that I was going to my room or going to eat an apple ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »