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 »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.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 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 »
Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, o...r just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »