The advantage man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter... to his destiny as a male. Through his identification of phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject. It is this conflict that especially marks the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as female, because she will not accept mutilation; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual, equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her femininity is to renounce a part of her humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a ...cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of wo...men, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country--it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the... purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creato...rs under any circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,... Threatening the welkin with his big-swollen face?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »