There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to h...old onto--God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So this is the subterranean life. If it can't be conjugated onto us, what good is it?... What need for purists when the demotic is built to last, To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"End of tomorrow. Don't try to start the car or look deeper... Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer Until the whole thing overflows like a silver Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge that for women in middle adulthood, multiple roles can tie in with well-being should help younger women who are stru...ggling with the pressures of small children and a job, and who may be tempted to abandon or severely curtail their career goals.... The woman who manages to hang onto her career may be in for some stress in her younger years when the pulls and tugs of family and career can be intense, but if she can persist, her chances for much smoother sailing in her mature years seem very good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politicians--power itself--are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives.... One sho...uld be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abjectness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In contrast with envy, which usually occurs between two people and is focused upon another person's qualities or possessions, jeal...ousy occurs when a third person becomes a threat to a dyad. Jealousy involves the loss or the impending loss of a relationship that one wants to hold onto, a relationship that is vital to personal fulfillment and claimed as one's own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If men were equally at risk from this condition--if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage c...irrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains--then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »