The country is fed up with children and their problems. For the first time in history, the differences in outlook between people r...aising children and those who are not are beginning to assume some political significance. This difference is already a part of the conflicts in local school politics. It may spread to other levels of government. Society has less time for the concerns of those who raise the young or try to teach them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can grouse about the food, and the C.O. and anything I blame please. And that's more than you with your Gestapo and your storm t...roopers and your Aryan bourgeois. Ahhh, nuts. What's the good of talking to you. You can't even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed wit...h fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It might sound a paradoxical thing to say--for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental tim...e--but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And when the festival was over, that was the end of it all. And I do not think I am being fanciful when I say that this was at lea...st partly because it had already taken place--but elsewhere. After all, this story of Al*Ith has taught us all that what goes on in one Zone affects the others, even when we believe we are hostile, or forget everything that goes on outside our own borders. We share and exchange our times of sluggishness, insularity, self- applause. When those women stove and struggled to lift their poor heads up so they could see our mountain towering over them it was as if they were secretly pouring energy and effort into springs that fed us all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules--that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the ...devilish in it--that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. It hardens as his arteries harden. It has Katzenjammer on the days succeeding his indiscretions. It is gaudy when he is young and gathers decorum as he grows old. On the day after he makes a mash on a new girl it glows and glitters. If he has fed well, it is mellow. If he has gastritis it is bitter. In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else. To attempt to teach it is as silly as to set up courses in making love. The man who makes love out of a book is not making love at all; he is simply imitating someone else making love. God help him if, in love or literary composition, his preceptor be a pedagogue!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheephook, or have learn'd ought else the least... That to the faithful herdman's art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped. And when they list their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw, The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished.... ...But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were his humanities, and not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »