Children, randomly at first, hit upon something sooner or later that is their mother's and/or father's Achilles' heel, a kind of b...ehavior that especially upsets, offends, irritates or embarrasses them. One parent dislikes name-calling, another teasing...another bathroom jokes. For the parents, this behavior my have ties back to their childhood, many have been something not allowed, forbidden, and when it appears in the child, it causes high-voltage reaction in the parent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I... tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;Mthough I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would ...drive me mad on my death-bed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
La la la, Oh music swims back to me and I can feel the tune they played... the night they left me in this private institution on a hill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping that something might improve if I viewed all... sides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and to be able to use one's prejudice as an excuse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And wo...uld like to go on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American manners have evolved in a climate in many ways very different from those of the civilization to which most Americans owe ...their heritage. In most European countries manners have evolved as fences, and conventions of public behavior have been devised to protect one's "place." The shopkeeper had one set of manners toward his customers and another toward his employees, as the butler did toward his "master" and toward the servants, and the squire toward his gamekeeper and his mother-in-law. The idea that manners should be an expression of general regard for one's fellow man is the product of a society that hoped to be classless, and though it has fallen far short of its intentions, our conventions are the very opposite of those designed to protect one class from another. What we have tried to do in America is to perpetuate a set of conventions that give the impression of not being conventions at all but attitudes which, we hope, indicate that one of us is as good as another, as deserving of consideration, and as responsible for maintaining a state of good will. Almost as far back as one can go in the literature (if it can be called that) of American etiquette, one finds that manners are referred to as "minor morals."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[My father] was a lazy man. It was the days of independent incomes, and if you had an independent income you didn't work. You were...n't expected to. I strongly suspect that my father would not have been particularly good at working anyway. He left our house in Torquay every morning and went to his club. He returned, in a cab, for lunch, and in the afternoon went back to the club, played whist all afternoon, and returned to the house in time to dress for dinner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when the right of the individual is made sacred, when the image of God in human form, whether in marble or in clay, whether in... alabaster or in ebony, is consecrated and inviolable, when men have been taught to look beneath the rags and grime, the pomp and pageantry of mere circumstance and have regard unto the celestial kernel uncontaminated at the core,--when race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the accidents, not the substance of life, and consequently as not obscuring or modifying the inalienable title to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,--then is mastered the science of politeness, the art of courteous contact, which is naught but the practical application of the principal [sic] of benevolence, the back bone and marrow of all religion; then woman's lesson is taught and woman's cause is won--not the white woman nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seekin...g to fight his way back to happiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »