After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember wh...at femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way.... She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You all talk like somebody else made these laws and Pharaoh don't know nothing about 'em. He makes 'em his own self and he's glad ...when we come tell him they hurt. why, that's a whole lot of pleasure to him, to be making up laws all the time and to have a crowd like us around handy to pass all his mean ones on. Why, that's a whole everything under the sun! Next thing you know he'll be saying cats can't have kittens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is an anecdote passed around in psychoanalytical circles, about a boy who for no apparent reason reached the age of six with...out ever speaking. One night he suddenly said, "Please pass the mashed potatoes." The boy had never spoken before because his mother had always met every one of his needs without him saying a word. This is the epitome of the too good mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us hope ... that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world wi...thin us, we shall secure an individual, social and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universa...l and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live... the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The sp...ace that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar--these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just walking around, An object of curiosity to some,... But you are too preoccupied By the secret smudge in the back of your soul To say much, and wander around, Smiling to yourself and others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »