And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to th...e woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How much time, approximately, can a worker in a hectic, speeded-up world give to his work and be a sane, all-round, informed, and ...recreated citizen? Unless he lives near his work, due allowance must be made for going and coming. Eight hours for sleep and eight hours for family and social life, education, recreation, and other activities which include, in the case of many women workers, keeping house and clothes in order and taking care of a family, and in the case of all workers, occasional visits to dentists and doctors, paying gas bills and the thousand and one other things an increasingly complicated life thrusts upon even the humblest, seem minimal for the "mechanics of living."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Talk of politeness when humanity is perishing--of the sacred sphere of woman when thousands of my sisters are prostitutes--how man...y from necessity, God only knows. I have not the least patience with the exquisite dandy and the fashionable flirt attempting to define proprieties--they have money, let them define dollars. Neither have I patience with a set of croakers who regret the present state of things; but how can it be helped? say they with a yawn. Look at your widowed sister struggling to preserve a home--the hectic on that cheek, produced by overtasking her physical strength, tells you death will soon set his seal upon her. Look at that married woman--sleepless nights and toilsome days cloud her brow and irritate her temper. Shall woman's voice be hushed when woman's shrieks are heard? Shall woman quench her light, when clouds of invisible sorrows gather thick round woman's head?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At first your mother said . . . why me! why me! But she got over that. Now she enjoys... her dull daily care and her hectic bravery. You do not love anyone. She is not growing a boy; she is enlarging a stone to wear around her neck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead... Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American "energy"... is the energy of violence, of free- floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocation...s which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self- punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hyde Park engendered shadows. The dying greenery of hurtbushes and larches, under the grey shells of clouds that now began to snap... with rain, caught that feeble light in London, neither night nor day but rather that feeble compromise which, more than the presage of autumn, filled one with a sense of long-forgotten things and showed itself to be that time when vague yearnings and regrets began to cumber the soul. Over the plains of grass burst puffs of irregular wind, spirits that spun the falling leaves, hectic, red, flapping through the wake in little side streets where, now, no one was to be seen, having long since hurried away through the silence and the telling cold. The ragged mirage of day had suicided into the cold dusk. Night fell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »