I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on th...e brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thy soul and body, when death's agony Besieged around thy noble heart,... Did not with more reluctance part Than I, my dearest Friend, do part from thee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well--but, when confront...ed with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver's seat, it is our reluctan...ce, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We hear the haunting presentiment of a dutiful middle age in the current reluctance of young people to select any option except th...e one they feel will impinge upon them the least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
James's great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine a...loofness--that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually "taken place"Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, "gone on."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »