What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the Denver House, a hastily erected log structure roofed and partitioned with canvas, described by Horace Greeley in 1859 as "T...he Astor House of the Gold Fields," orchestra leader Jones and his spirited men were interrupted by sporadic but not unforeseen bursts of gunfire that sent them diving for shelter behind a low iron-plated enclosure. Before the smoke had fairly cleared away, they were up again desperately playing and singing: Ha, boys, ho! Ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness, Ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness? Ha, boys, ho!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entire...ly dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The greatest part of each day, each year, each lifetime is made up of small, seemingly insignificant moments. Those moments may be... cooking dinner...relaxing on the porch with your own thoughts after the kids are in bed, playing catch with a child before dinner, speaking out against a distasteful joke, driving to the recycling center with a week's newspapers. But they are not insignificant, especially when these moments are models for kids.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Someday our grandchildren will look up at us and say, "Where were you, Grandma, and what were you doing when you first realized th...at President Reagan was, er, not playing with a full deck?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Contramasculinity: the apparent selflessness of the female, who allows every man who comes her way to shape her; her lack of resis...tance, her limitlessness, that softness and pliancy which basically never take seriously the shape the man gives her. She is always capable of being molded to new shapes: this is what a man describes as the harlot in her, a basic element of the female character that he can never fathom. One might also call it playacting. Playing at being somebody different, at dressing up. When a man wraps himself in a costume, is he not in fact taking a step in the direction of perversion, femininity, contramasculinity?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The ...psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »