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 »
The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual: the position of the genitals--inter urinas et faec...es--remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: "Anatomy is destiny."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity.... Nothing in the world was irrelevant: t...he stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds.... Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Laid out for death, let thy last kindness be With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:... And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter, Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister! For epitaph, in foliage, next write this: Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This war no longer bears the characteristics of former inter-European conflicts. It is one of those elemental conflicts which ushe...r in a new millennium and which shake the world once in a thousand years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cities are expanding at an alarming rate. Inter-tidal zones are being polluted as mangroves gives way to marina. Over-consumption ...is leading to soil erosion and desertification, which in turn cause famine and exert pressure on formerly fertile areas. We are pulling out the plugs of the system that keeps us alive. Every indicator is showing red: species diversity, water quality, weather patterns, the number of refugees.... We are unravelling nature like an old jumper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his... son,--the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,--for youth and age then went a-fishing together,--full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here on this rugged and woody hillside has grown an apple tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural gr...owth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we prize and use depend entirely on our care.... But the apple emulates man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain themselves. Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and ofte...n it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »