Traditionally, marriage involved a kind of bartering, rather than mutual inter-dependence or role sharing. Husbands financially an...d economically supported wives, while wives emotionally, psychologically and socially supported husbands. He brought home the bacon, she cooked it. He fixed the plumbing, she the psyche.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one ...when it is woven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure predict...ion fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packa...ged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it i...s woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the family were a container, it would be a nest, an enduring nest, loosely woven, expansive, and open. If the family were a fru...it, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable--each segment distinct. If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. If the family were a sport, it would be baseball: a long, slow, nonviolent game that is never over until the last out. If the family were a building, it would be an old but solid structure that contains human history, and appeals to those who see the carved moldings under all the plaster, the wide plank floors under the linoleum, the possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a time for building And a time for living and for generation... And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »