...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 »
The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it wa...s like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open bo...ok, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gentleman, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot. I im...plore you, send him back to his father and brothers who are waiting for him with open arms in the penitentiary. I suggest that we give him ten years in Levenworth or eleven years in Twelveworth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And all the great traditions of the Past They saw reflected in the coming time....
And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of e...xistence paralyzes me... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I'd rea...d, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers--especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »