...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So-called "austerity," the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path.... "Pull in your belt" is a slogan closely related to "gird up your loins," or the guns-butter metaphor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? . . . Isn't it bad public policy? . . . No politi...cian with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, t...he moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suddenly he found he had pressed the spring of the grenade. He struggled to pull it out of his pocket. It stuck in the narrow pock...et. His arm and his cold fingers that clutched the grenade seemed paralyzed. Then a warm joy went through him. He had thrown it. Anderson was standing up, swaying backwards and forwards. The explosion made the woods quake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today, San Francisco has experienced a double tragedy of incredible proportions. As acting mayor, I order an immediate state of mo...urning in our city. The city and county of San Francisco must and will pull itself together at this time. We will carry on as best as we possibly can.... I think we all have to share the same sense of shame and the same sense of outrage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excludi...ng them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight... before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a moan among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying... a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »