All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values a...nd dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Single mothers have as much to teach their children as married mothers and as much love to share--maybe more. Yet their motives ar...e often labeled selfish and single-minded--never mind all the babies brought into the world to snag husbands, "save" faltering marriages or produce heirs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and ...no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labeled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art can never be. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. But the sociability of religion is part of its fundamental nature. The life of religion is always the life of a church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled "the past," and, having thus emptied t...his deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, ha...s been labeled Utopian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles. Smiling, in faulty grammar,... She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career. So to please her I studied--but I will remember always How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled All the wild sauces of the brimming year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference w...ork, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers. It creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy strobe light of that lie. However we choose to identify ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts our lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus wrote a woman, partly brave and partly good,... who fought with what she partly understood. Few men about her would or could do more, hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
See, each man and each woman actually does have an owner's manual. Nothing's written down anywhere, but the directions for operati...on of an individual in a relationship are detailed and specific nonetheless. So when you start out with someone, you're essentially driving a strange car for the first time and none of the controls are labeled. So the wipers can come on at strange times, sometimes you stall. On top of that we've all met people with bad steering, no brakes, needs a muffler, headlights a little dim, too much in the trunk, not enough under the hood, prone to backfiring, won't turn over, and just plain out of gas. Which is why when people get ready to get married they so often seem to choose basic transportation. It's simple, it's reliable, and it gets you there. That's important on a long trip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »