I often think about the opening words of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of ti...mes." I know Dickens wasn't talking about one- to three- year-olds, but his words do capture the extremes of emotion that toddlers and their parents experience every day. Can there be a creature on earth as adorable--and as trying--as a toddler?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
L.A. is the ultimate anonymous city: except when you choose not to be, you are generally alone. New Yorkers are never alone. It's ...surprising that street crime happens here at all, since muggings and rapes require solitude for the proper intimacy between criminal and victim, and in New York you have to go looking for a genuinely deserted block of street. Furthermore, whereas at night it can get dark in some parts of L.A., New Yorkers are never without light, at least the artificial kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's not enough to be great, Charley. I tried to tell you in Philly. I tried to tell you in L.A. We're infested with rats! [to Peg..., Charley's fiancee] He's not just a kid who can fight, he's money! And people want money so bad they make it stink!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression of the ways and dreams of this primitive people, brooded ov...er and harmonised by the energetic Greek imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers; welding into something like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man's experiences of a given object, or series of objects--all the hidden ordinances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other co...mpanions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas--of conceptions,... which having no link on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the house of the prudent countryman will be, of course, a place of honest manners; and Demeter Thesmophoros is the guardian of... married life, the deity of the discretion of wives. She is therefore the founder of civilised order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »