Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others--first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enorm...ous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then res...umes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The ho...rse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its ...hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Midway along the journey of our life [Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita] I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandere...d off from the straight path.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are bla...meless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lanza del Vasto noted a deep connection between play and war, even before the games theory and nuclear war strategy became practic...ally identified. In our society, everything, in fact, is a game. But if everything is a game, then everything leads to war. Play is aimless and yet multiplies obstacles so that the "aim," which in fact does not exist, cannot be attained by the opponent. For instance, getting a ball in a hole. War is caused by similar aimless aims. Not by hunger, not by real need. War is a game of the powerful, or of whole collectivities devoted to self-assertion. It is "the great public vice that consists in playing with the lives of men." War plays with life and death, and does so magnificently. Everybody becomes involved. Everybody has to live or die--so that other side may not get a ball in a hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The w...ild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever there's a big war coming on, you should rope off a big field. And on the big day, you should take all the kings and their... cabinets and their generals, put 'em in the center dressed in their underpants and let them fight it out with clubs. The best country wins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kemmerick: He's dead. He's dead. Katczinsky: Why did you risk your life bringing him in?... Kemmerick: But it's Behm. My friend. Katczinsky: It's a corpse, no matter who it is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »