Mother baseball. I enjoy speculating about its bloody beginnings as a fertility rite. Funny that with all the verbiage about the s...port no one mentions the obvious structural relationship between a baseball stadium and a womb: in design, a stadium is both a circle and a "Y," two notorious female symbols. The curved and sloping shape of the stands is like a plush endometrium in which we fans cozy up to watch a lone batter square off against the universe.... I especially like to think about that when announcers describe players' bats as fast, corked, dead, quiet, live, or as loaded barrels--and pitches as high hard ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y....M.C.A.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian e...ndeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. ...No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to acce...pt, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too--unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child's trouble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who comes into Assemblies only to gratifie his Curiosity, and not to make a Figure, enjoys the Pleasures of Retirement in a[n] ......exquisite Degree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past,... A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and ...among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »