The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really impor...tant to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder--in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recall...s a beloved object to one's memory, and makes one feel one's love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To long for that which comes not. To lie a-bed and sleep not. To serve well and please not. To have a horse that goes not. To have... a man obeys not. To lie in jail and hope not. To be sick and recover not. To lose one's way and know not. To wait at door and enter not, and to have a friend we trust not: are ten such spites as hell hath not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Staying in charge as a mother means exercising one's own judgment about what is best for one's child. It means, at times, disregar...ding the advice of experts. It means fighting one's way into institutional decision making in an effort to make it responsive to the needs of one's own child. It means trusting one's own point of view. Most of all, it means developing the ability to tolerate both the internal anxiety and the external hostility that are generated when one tries to stay in charge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals--and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not... sure would ever feel this way--some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first time many women hold their tiny babies, they are apt to feel as clumsy and incompetent as any man. The difference is tha...t our culture tells them they're not supposed to feel that way. Our culture assumes that they will quickly learn how to be a mother, and that assumption rubs off on most women--so they learn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »