There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most p...eople go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men have a low threshold for distraction. They are delicate. They are made nervous by having to do more than one thing at a time. ...They feel frazzled and angry if they have to answer three phone calls, and have a hard time settling back to work after the trauma. Women, on the other hand, develop the skill of doing many things at once. They tuck the phone in between their shoulders and their ears, hold a baby on one hip, stir a pot on the stove, all the while thinking about an idea for a story. They don't think it's unfair to have to do this. They think it's normal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People get real comfortable with their features. Nobody gets comfortable with their hair. Hair trauma. It's the universal thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace ...between our parents' safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in t...he race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error.... I now see the hierarchical ...as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Living by basic good-mothering guidelines enables a mom to blend the responsibilities of parenthood with its joys; to know when to... stand her ground and when to be flexible; and to absorb the lessons of the parenting gurus while also trusting her inner voice when it reasons that another cookie isn't worth fighting over, or that her child won't suffer irreparable trauma if, once in a while, Mom puts her own needs first.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ... toyed with the idea of going to find another war where I could at least feel alive. I was so numb that it took terror to mak...e me feel anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the mass migrations now habitual in our nation are disastrous to the family and to the formation of individual character. It i...s impossible to create a stable society if something like a third of our people are constantly moving about. We cannot grow fine human beings, any more than we can grow fine trees, if they are constantly torn up by the roots and transplanted ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »