Reality is a prison, where ... one vegetates and always will. All the rest--thought, action--is just a pastime, mental or physical.... What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What are you now? If we could touch one another, if these our separate entities could come to grips,... clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday I stood in a crowded street that was live with people, and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone. Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I didn't come to this with any particular cachet. I was just a person who grew up in the United States. And when I looked aroun...d at the people who were sportscasters, I thought they were just people who grew up in the United States, too. So I thought, Why can't a woman do it? I just assumed everyone else would think it was a swell idea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind star...t vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you "come to terms with" only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women have acquired equal place to man in society, but the double standard has really never been relinquished; certainly not by me...n. Modern man's fear of passivity or of the active woman proves to be as eternal as modern woman's struggle to come to terms with her femininity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the 'human essence,' the distinctive qualities of mind that ...are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social. Hence the fascination of this study, and, no less, its frustration. The frustration arises from the coming to grips with the core problem of human language, which I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions that are new to one's experience, that bear no simply physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's linguistic experience; and one is able ... to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty.... The normal use of language is, in this sense, a creative activity. This creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate ... ...but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not [the toddler's] job yet to consider other people's feelings, he has to come to terms with his own first. If he hits you ...and you hit him back to "show him what it feels like," you will have given a lesson he is not ready to learn. He will wail as if hitting was a totally new idea to him. He makes no connections between what he did to you and what you then did to him; between your feelings and his own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »