The two year old...loves, deeply, tenderly, extravagantly and he holds the love of his parents more dearly than anything in the wo...rld.... He wants to be good in order to earn their love and approval; he wants to be good so that he can love himself. (This is what we mean, later, by self-esteem.)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents often behave much like members of an old-fashioned aristocracy. They maintain private rituals, which they often do not... really understand themselves. They are extremely conservative in their dress and tastes, but the conventions to which they adhere are purely those of their own social group; they try to ignore the norms of the larger society if these conflict with their own. They can be extravagantly generous and extravagantly cruel, but rarely petty or conniving. Their virtues are courage and loyalty; while even the necessity for even a moderate degree of compromise humiliates them greatly. They tend to be pugnacious and quarrelsome about what they believe to be their rights, but naive and reckless in defending them. They are shy, but not modest. If they become very anxious they are likely to behave eccentrically, to withdraw, or to attack with some brutality; they are less likely to blend themselves innocuously into the environment with an apologetic smile. They are honest on occasions when even a stupid adult would have better sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, s...hy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who ...try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the ...storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh... At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too-- Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out-- And take upon 's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »