Rape is a culturally fostered means of suppressing women. Legally we say we deplore it, but mythically we romanticize and perpetua...te it, and privately we excuse and overlook it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right hand and the left--the one the doer, the other t...he dreamer. The right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say only that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the great hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the right hand. Of the left hand we say that it is awkward and, while it has been proposed that art students can seduce their proper hand to more expressiveness by drawing first with the left, we nonetheless suspect this function. The French speak of the illegitimate descendent as being à main gauche, and, though the heart is virtually at the center of the thoracic cavity, we listen for it on the left. Sentiment, intuition, bastardy. And should we say that reaching for knowledge with the left hand is art? Again it is not enough, for as surely as the recital of a daydream differs from the well-wrought tale, there is a barrier between undisciplined fantasy and art. To climb the barrier requires a right hand adept at technique and artifice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You must not feel too anxious about the little folks with you.... Their little peculiarities, which with your older judgment do no...t seem favorable, will gradually disappear as they get older. It is best to overlook most things, and not be too solicitous about perfection. I am afraid you will think I will spoil our children by too little government. Perhaps we do err on the other side, but you must come down and instruct us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not think ...of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time... when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most familiar sheet of water, viewed from a new hilltop, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have traveled a few m...iles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere. It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The single road which runs lengthwise the Cape, now winding over the plain, now through the shrubbery, which scrapes the wheels of... the stage, was a mere cart-track in the sand, commonly without any fences to confine it, and continually changing from this side to that, to harder ground, or sometimes to avoid the tide. But the inhabitants travel in waste here and there pilgrim- wise and staff in hand, by narrow foot-paths, through which the sand flows out and reveals the nakedness of the land. We shuddered at the thought of living there and taking our afternoon walks over those barren swells, where we could overlook every step of our walk before taking it, and would have to pray for a fog or a snow-storm to conceal our destiny. The walker there must soon eat his heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles. There i...t was, the State of Maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that,--immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, the eastern stuff we hear of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »