Many women are reluctant to allow men to enter their domain. They don't want men to acquire skills in what has traditionally been ...their area of competence and one of their main sources of self-esteem. So while they complain about the male's unwillingness to share in domestic duties, they continually push the male out when he moves too confidently into what has previously been their exclusive world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in or...der to benefit by the contrast.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where prev...iously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of theater from the medieval period until the nineteenth century has been in large part a history of further and furth...er separations of the scene of dramatic action from the physical situation of the audience. Even as the subject matter--in the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg--became more and more continuous with the life of the audience, the stage itself pulled in its apron, emphasized its proscenium, and became a room with an invisible fourth wall, allowing the audience to look in, while keeping it more definitely outside. The progress of film was the reverse. From the stylized and theatrical settings of the early dramas, silent films moved into greater and greater involvement with the actors. Previously the audience saw actors from a distance, with a sense of tableau and formal separation. Although they seemed to be like us, they were not: silent, hieratic, caught in frightened frenzies of comedy, tragedy, and melodrama.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While girls [age 9ââ¬â12] appear to have much more social know-how, they are characteristically cliquey, disloyal, cruel..., insecure, and a bit bitchy now. Today's best friend becomes tomorrow's discard. Parents watch in horror at what seem to be total personality changes in previously lovely, upright little girls. Sometimes girls are just as unsettled by their behavior as the disapproving elders who watch them. Sometimes they are unregenerate, relishing their freewheeling and dealing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn qui...ckly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult.... It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain ...began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which--miraculously, it seems--merge into a si...gnificant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To certain temperaments, especially when previously agitated by any deep feeling, there is perhaps nothing more exasperating, and ...which sooner explodes all self-command, than the coarse, jeering insolence of a porter, cabman, or hack-driver.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »