Being a member of the labor force and a full-time parent means trying to manage against overwhelming odds in an unresponsive socie...ty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the e...ndless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you've ever been without money, or food, something very strange happens when you get a bit of money, a kind of madness. You don...'t care. You can't remember that you had no money before, that the money will be gone. You can remember nothing but that there is the money for which you have been suffering. Now here it is. A lust takes hold of you. You see food in the windows. In imagination you eat hugely; you taste a thousand meals. You look in windows. Colors are brighter; you buy something to dress up in. An excitement takes hold of you. You know it is suicide but you can't help it. You must have food, dainty, splendid food and a bright hat so once again you feel blithe, rid of that ratty gnawing shame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The westerner, normally, walks to get somewhere that he cannot get in an automobile or on horseback. Hiking for its own sake, for ...the sheer animal pleasure of good condition and brisk exercise, is not an easy thing for him to comprehend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly ...called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's sel...f in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society."... This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dusty road, now in... a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our p...roposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »