With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is to be lamented that the principle of national has had very little nourishment in our country, and, instead, has given place ...to sectional or state partialities. What more promising method for remedying this defect than by uniting American women of every state and every section in a common effort for our whole country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for the... eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who first introduced compulsory education into American life knew exactly why children should go to school and learn to read...: to save their souls.... Consistent with this goal, the first book written and printed for children in America was titled Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, drawn from the Breasts of both Testaments for their Souls' Nourishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past experiences. What happened in the past is lived again in memory. ...About what goes on today hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an experience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things. Hence he lives not, like the beasts of the field, in a world of merely physical things but in a world of signs and symbols. A stone is not merely hard, a thing into which one bumps; but it is a monument of a deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely something which warms or burns, but is a symbol of the enduring life of the household, of the abiding source of cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns from his casual wanderings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,... is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn't ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this b...east grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak. What is more, they need a steak. Preferab...ly they need it rare, grilled, heavily salted, for that way it is most easily digested, and most quickly turned into the glandular whip their tired adrenals cry for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »