Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's househol...d, and, underneath, another--secret and passionate and intense--which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive t...erm democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the romance is the way in which they view reality. The novel renders reality c...losely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of people and sets them going about the business of life. We come to see these people in their real complexity of temperament and motive. Character is more important than action or plot, and probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of characters, or a way of life.... By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval example, feels free to render reality in less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a tendency to discuss surrealism and cubism as if one proceeds out of the other, but in fact there is no similarity. Cubi...sm was a way of painting that a group of painters imposed on themselves, surrealism a philosophy of life put forward by a band of poets. The first was essentially a method of breaking up the object and putting it together again according to concepts of pictorial structure, a phase of the greatest importance in the development of such painters as Picasso, Braque, Marcoussis, and Gris, but affecting literature only through Apollinaire, and life hardly at all. The second was the attempt of a highly organized group to change life altogether, to make a new kind of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man... can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture--in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our conversation begins to look like the last scene in Eugene O'Neill's great family drama, Long Day's Journey Into the [sic] Nigh...t. Sitting together in a dwindling pool of light, the family talks on. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters are trying to explain: not understanding, but comprehending; loving one another, but hating and hurting each other; tangling and untangling like badly cast fishing lines, a group of inviolate, wounded selves. O'Neill's characters, like the rest of us, are speaking about the family in order to explain their attitudes toward life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing intrinsically better about a child who happily bounces off to school the first day and a child who is wary, watch...ful, and takes a longer time to separate from his parents and join the group. Neither one nor the other is smarter, better adjusted, or destined for a better life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... work is only part of a man's life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelli...gent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A new world of complex relationships and feelings opens up when the peer group takes its place alongside the family as the emotion...al focus of the child's life. Early peer relationships contribute significantly to the child's ability to participate in a group (and in that sense, society), deal with competition and disappointment, enjoy the intimacy of friendships, and intuitively understand social relationships as they play out at school, in the neighborhood, and later in the workplace and adult family.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »