You are, I am sure, aware that genuine popular support in the United States is required to carry out any Government policy, foreig...n or domestic. The American people make up their own minds and no governmental action can change it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had heard so much about how hard it was supposed to be that, when they were little, I thought it would be horrible when they got... married and left. But that's silly you know. . . . By the time they grow up, they change and you change. Eventually, they're not the same little kids and you're not the same mother. It's as if everything just falls into a pattern and you're ready.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind abo...ut in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Ri...viera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, or Ed Whelen, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebo...dy looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suddenly we have a baby who poops and cries, and we are trying to calm, clean up, and pin things together all at once. Then as fas...t as we learn to cope--so soon--it is hard to recall why diapers ever seemed so important. The frontiers change, and now perhaps we have a teenager we can't reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certain ...irreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a tendency to discuss surrealism and cubism as if one proceeds out of the other, but in fact there is no similarity. Cubi...sm was a way of painting that a group of painters imposed on themselves, surrealism a philosophy of life put forward by a band of poets. The first was essentially a method of breaking up the object and putting it together again according to concepts of pictorial structure, a phase of the greatest importance in the development of such painters as Picasso, Braque, Marcoussis, and Gris, but affecting literature only through Apollinaire, and life hardly at all. The second was the attempt of a highly organized group to change life altogether, to make a new kind of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we confine ourselves to one life role, no matter how pleasant it seems at first, we starve emotionally and psychologically. We ...need a change and balance in our daily lives. We need sometimes to dress up and sometimes to lie around in torn jeans. . . . Even a grimy factory can afford some relief from a grimy kitchen and vice versa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experien...ce. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »