When we sent our first child off to school I experienced a jarring moment, an epiphany. I had been teaching young children for man...y years, advising parents on a wide range of issues, including the best and most painless ways to separate from their youngsters at school. When my own time came, I found that all my good advice to others was impossible to follow myself.... I felt like a midwife friend of mine who had assisted in the births of hundreds of babies before her own first child was born. In the middle of labor she cried out, "I've told hundreds of women, 'you can do it,' and it can't be done."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school,... college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-c...orn informations!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the c...ity continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the combined names of Social Intercourse, Meeting Interesting People, and Getting Out of a Rut, I have taken, in my time, some ...terrible beatings. I have listened to poets rendering their own odes. I have had the plots of yet unwritten plays given me in tiniest detail, I have assisted in charades, I have been politely mystified by card tricks, I have even been sent out of the room and been forced, on my return, to ask the assembled company such questions as I hoped might reveal to me what Famous Character in Fiction they represented. I have spent entire evenings knee-deep in derry-down-derries, listening to quaint old English ballads done without accompaniment; I have been backed into cold corners by pianos while composers showed me how that thing they wrote three years before Gershwin did "The Man I Love" went; I knew a young man who has an inlaid ukelele. You see these gray hairs? Well, making whoopee with the intelligentsia was the way I earned them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial--or is it post- colonial?--cudgels against English. What seems t...o me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it--assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"All is quiet at Harper's Ferry," say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slavehol...der prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance; now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a ...fate in it, and all things thwarted or assisted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before... yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »