Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others--first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enorm...ous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then res...umes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The ho...rse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its ...hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An endless imbroglio Is law and the world,--... Then first shalt thou know, That in the wild turmoil, Horsed on the Proteus, Thou ridest to power, And to endurance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are bla...meless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While yet alive, before their tints had faded, they glistened like the fairest flowers, the product of primitive rivers; and he co...uld hardly trust his senses, as he stood over them, that these jewels should have swam away ... for so long, so many dark ages;Mthese bright fluviatile flowers, seen of Indians only, made beautiful, the Lord only knows why, to swim there! I could understand better for this, the truth of mythology, the fables of Proteus, and all those beautiful sea-monsters,--how all history, indeed, put to a terrestrial use, is mere history; but put to a celestial, is mythology always.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;... So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is there a bridle for this Proteus That turns and changes like his draughty seas?... Or is there none, most popular of men, But when they mock us, that we mock again?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »