"Mother" has always been a generic term synonymous with love, devotion, and sacrifice. There's always been something mystical and ...reverent about them. They're the Walter Cronkites of the human race . . . infallible, virtuous, without flaws and conceived without original sin, with no room for ambivalence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kitchens were different then, too--not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different... from a frozen pie thawing. Oilcloth and linoleum and apples in an open bowl and ruffled rubber aprons make a different aromatic mix from Formica and ceramic tile and mangoes in an acrylic fruit ripener and plastic-coated aprons printed with "Who invited all these tacky people?" And the kitchen sounds. I am not sure that today's kitchen is noisier. But the noises are different. Today you get the song of the food processor and the blender, the intermittent hum of the reefer and the freezer, the buzz-slosh-and-grunt of the dishwasher, the violently audible digestive processes of the waste disposal in the sink. Then it was the whir and clatter of the hand-powered eggbeater, the thunk-thunk-thunk of somebody mashing potatoes, or, in green-pea season, the crisp pop of pea pod and the rattle-rattle-rattle of peas into the pan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "text" is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the s...ociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One thing I have learned in institutions is not to press hard on the fact that their inmates are, like the rest of mankind, sinner...s; for they, like many others, are liable to confuse the generic term "sinner" with the specific term "criminal." Most of us are so accustomed to admit that we have fallen short of grace and are "miserable offenders," in view of our possibilities and opportunities, that we do not resent being called "sinners"; but not so with our congregation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »