Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging ove...r it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Money indeed may be considered as the most universal and expressive of all languages. For gold and silver coins are no more money ...when not in the actual process of being voluntarily used in purchase, than words not so in use are language. Pounds, shillings, and pence are recognized covenanted tokens, the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual purchasing power, but till in actual use they are only potential money, as the symbols of language, whatever they may be, are only potential language till they are passing between two minds. It is the power and will to apply the symbols that alone gives life to money, and as long as they are in abeyance, the money is in abeyance also; the coins may be safe in one's pocket, but they are as dead as a log till they begin to burn in it, and so are our words till they begin to burn within us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, yo...u were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to fe...el as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage--the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politenesses.... But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not likely,... let me live as I will, that I shall ever be a rich woman, if I am to live in America; the cost of one's exist...ence here is something fabulous, and the amount of discomfort one obtains for money, that purchases a liberal allowance of luxury as well as comfort in Europe, is by no means a small item of annoyance in one's daily life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity--it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's min...d.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In order to prove a friend to one's guests, frugality must reign in one's meals; and, according to an ancient saying, one must eat... to live, not live to eat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of ...the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »