No doubt for the average man nationalism is no more than one of the faiths that live together in actual if illogical partnership i...n his heart and mind (illogical in the sense that some of these faiths, say Christianity and national patriotism, may have mutually incompatible ethical ideals). Yet it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which for many modern Western men the worship of the nation-state occupies a major part of their conscious relations with groups outside the family.... The ritual surrounding the flag, patriotic hymns, the reverent reading of patriotic texts, the glorification of national heroes (saints), the insistence on the nation's mission, the nation's basic consonance with the scheme of the universe--all of this is so familiar to most of us that unless we are internationalist crusaders in favor of a world-state or some other proposed means for securing universal peace we never even notice it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books,... unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suspect a demand for real change in power relations will occur only if women ... come to understand that their need for romances... is a function of their dependent status as women and of their acceptance of marriage as the only route to female fulfillment. I think we as feminists might help this change along by first learning to recognize that romance reading originates in very real dissatisfaction and embodies a valid, if limited, protest. Then by developing strategies for making that dissatisfaction and its causes consciously available to romance readers and by learning how to encourage that protest in such a way that it will be delivered in the arena of actual social relations rather than acted out in the imagination, we might join hands with women who are, after all, our sisters and together imagine a world whose subsequent creation would lead to the need for a new fantasy altogether.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequen...ces of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.... They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more. There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain ou...r miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of He...nry V for the first time in a log cabin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »