Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used to... be." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical... about it.... It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and peop...le.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's not that I don't want to be a beauty, that I don't yearn to be dripping with glamor. It's just that I can't see how any woman... can find time to do to herself all the things that must apparently be done to make herself beautiful and, having once done them, how anyone without the strength of mind of a foreign missionary can keep up such a regime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of s...cience has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then we grow up to be Daddy. Domesticated men with undomesticated, frontier dreams. Suddenly life--or is it the children?--is not ...as cooperative as it ought to be. It's tough to be in command of anything when a baby is crying or a ten-year-old is in despair. It's tough to feel a sense of control when you've got to stop six times during the half-hour ride to Grandma's.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are accustomed to laugh at the French for their braggadocio propensities, and intolerable vanity about la France, la gloire, l'...Empereur, and the like; and yet I think in my heart that the British Snob, for conceit and self-sufficiency and braggartism in his way, is without a parallel. There is always something uneasy in a Frenchman's conceit. He brags with so much fury, shrieking, and gesticulation; yells out so loudly that the Francais is at the head of civilization, the centre of thought, etc., that one can't but see the poor fellow has a lurking doubt in his own mind that he is not the wonder he professes to be. About the British Snob, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no bluster, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all the world; we don't question the opinion at all; it's an axiom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We set this nation up ... to vindicate the rights of man. We did not name any differences between one race and another. We opened ...our gates to all the world and said: "Let all men who want to be free come to us and they will be welcome."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Roger Thornhill: Tell me, how does a girl like you get to be a girl like you? Eve Kendall: Lucky I guess.... Roger Thornhill: No, not lucky. Naughty, wicked, up to no good. Ever kill anyone? Because I bet you could tease a man to death without half trying. So stop trying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not all people are ready to accept psychiatry as a normal branch of medicine. The general impression, as I believe, is that a man ...who needs a psychiatrist must be crazy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »