The truth is, no matter how trying they become, babies two and under don't have the ability to make moral choices, so they can't b...e "bad." That category only exists in the adult mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If in a shimmering room the babies came, Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,... It was because night nursed them in its fold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works... down to the babies, we stand on common ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior--bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper-...-it's possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother's impending visit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we sent our first child off to school I experienced a jarring moment, an epiphany. I had been teaching young children for man...y years, advising parents on a wide range of issues, including the best and most painless ways to separate from their youngsters at school. When my own time came, I found that all my good advice to others was impossible to follow myself.... I felt like a midwife friend of mine who had assisted in the births of hundreds of babies before her own first child was born. In the middle of labor she cried out, "I've told hundreds of women, 'you can do it,' and it can't be done."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave... and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to hav...e any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day-in, day-out with people one d...oes not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »