You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger....... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it not ...a real triumph? I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again. So there is no danger of my repeating myself, and getting to a barrel of sermons, which you must upset, and begin again with.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for bein...g something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your no...tebooks and keep on the mantlepiece for ever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we focus mostly on how we might have been partly or wholly to blame for what might have been less than a perfect, problem- free... childhood, our guilt will overwhelm their pain. It becomes a story about us, not them. . . . When we listen, accept, and acknowledge, we feel regret instead, which is simply guilt without neurosis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The twenties are tryout years and what motivates young people are two contradictory impulses. The urge to create a structure that ...will serve their needs into the (barely) foreseeable future and the fear of being locked into a life pattern that will ultimately prove unsatisfying or limited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our [adult] children have an adult's right to make their own choices and have the responsibility of living with the consequences. ...If we make their problems ours, they avoid that responsibility, and we are faced with problems we can't and shouldn't solve.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only defin...ition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was "mine."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as c...lose and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderl...y toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »