We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and... glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born heir.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly... different ways--and all are right! At least all will do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must... somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there s...o that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You do not expect a distinguished lawyer to clean his own clothes, a doctor to groom his horse, a teacher to take care of the scho...olhouse furnace, a preacher to half-sole his shoes.... Yet a woman who enters upon any line of achievement is invariably hampered, for at least the early years, with the inbred desire to add to the labor of her profession all the so-called feminine duties, which, fulfilled to-day, are yet to be done to-morrow, which bring her neither comfort, gain nor reputation, and which by their perpetual demand diminish her powers for a higher quality of work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To me the "female principle" is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule b...y custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism ...for at least five hundred years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is bot...h natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself--or at least, you... show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »