A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against an author when he praises his second book at the expense of his first (or vice ve...rsa) and then expects the author to be grateful for what he has done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political a...ffiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our... nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is ...no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws ma...y be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework and... child care. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a "leisure gap" between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a "second shift" at home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is a Presbyterian first and an artist second, which is just as comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and a chorus gi...rl second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »