The American ideal ... of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and I...ndians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden--as an unpatriotic act--that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just becaus...e of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, b...ourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you'v...e been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the Native American tradition ... a man, if he's a mature adult, nurtures life. He does rituals that will help things grow, he ...helps raise the kids, and he protects the people. His entire life is toward balance and cooperativeness. The ideal of manhood is the same as the ideal of womanhood. You are autonomous, self-directing, and responsible for the spiritual, social and material life of all those with whom you live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and ...sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideal of men and women sharing equally in parenting and working is a vision still. What would it be like if women and men were... less different from each other, if our worlds were not so foreign? A male friend who shares daily parenting told me that he knows at his very core what his wife's loving for their daughter feels like, and that this knowing creates a stronger bond between them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the day will come when man will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside but in the councils of the nation. Then,... and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union, between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
José's my first non-rat romance. Not that he's my idea of the absolute finito. He's too prim and cautious to be my absolute ideal..., Now, if I could choose from anybody alive, I wouldn't pick José. Nehru, maybe, or Albert Schweitzer. Or Leonard Bernstein.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »