Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, wome...n are beginning to rise in response to the Mother's call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear load...ed with innuendo and fraught with implications.... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents are never forgiven for not giving just the right response at the appropriate moment. Or, rather, there are particular time...s in the adolescent's or young adult's life, when a certain response is needed, and this need is not met, and the failure to meet this need is forever remembered, and is never forgiven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior--bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper-...-it's possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother's impending visit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising..., the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of tria...l and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident--the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around... the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert--a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who change...s spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of w...hich history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »