In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness ...thrust upon 'em.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 »
After which you led me to water And bade me drink, which I did, owing to your kindness.... You would not let me out for two days and three nights, Bringing me books bound in wild thyme and scented wild grasses As if reading had any interest for me ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I borrowed today out of the Advocate's Library, David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, but found it so abstruse, so contrary to so...und sense and reason, and so drearying its effects on the mind, if it had any, that I resolved to return it without reading it. LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An actress reading a part for the first time tries many ways to say the same line before she settles into the one she believes sui...ts the character and situation best. There's an aspect of the rehearsing actress about the girl on the verge of her teens. Playfully, she is starting to try out ways to be a grown-up person.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when a great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in, and, throwing a roll of tobac...co into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the paper I am reading, "Here gurl," (I am past thirty) "you better git out 'n dis kyar 'f yer don't, I'll put yer out"Mmy mental annotation is Here's an American citizen who has been badly trained. He is sadly lacking in both "sweetness" and "light" ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To get time for civic work, for exercise, for neighborhood projects, reading or meditation, or just plain time to themselves, moth...ers need to hold out against the fairly recent but surprisingly entrenched myth that "good mothers" are constantly with their children. They will have to speak out at last about the demoralizing effect of spending day after day with small children, no matter how much they love them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Few stories are written about what happens to the princess after the wedding. Reading between the lines of other stories, we can s...ketch out her "happily ever after": The princess gets pregnant and hopes for sons. As long as she is faithful and bears sons, she is considered to be a good wife. We don't hear whether or not she's a good mother, unless something goes wrong with her children.... All of history has been written about the subsequent adventures in the chapters of his life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into yo...ur two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is curious to speculate why pornography is considered especially likely to stimulate its readers into performing the activities... described. The literature of murder is a vast one, particularly in the English language; enormous ingenuity is expended by writers in devising techniques for killing people, and these techniques are described with the greatest possible realism. The motives which would make murder desirable or profitable are so elaborated that they could easily persuade a reader into whose hands these books would be likely to fall that their case was parallel with that described in the book so that their problems could be solved in the same way. But I have never seen it seriously suggested that the literature of murder--detective stories or crime stories--tended to deprave and corrupt, or would incite weak-minded or immature readers into carrying out in reality the activities described in the fantasies. On the contrary, the literature of murder is considered particularly "healthy" and desirable; and in England representatives of all the most respected professions have stated that detective stories are among their favorite reading. Musing about murder is apparently "healthy"; musing about sexual enjoyment is not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »