When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a parad...ise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Constancy ... that small change of love, which people exact so rigidly, receive in such conterfeit coin, and repay in baser metal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A... man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fash...ion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Another potentiality of our irrepressible juvenility is a capacity to maintain until the onset of senility an active creative inte...raction with our environment. We persist in exploring, investigating, inventing, discovering. In these respects humans of all eras, in all societies, all ages of life, are more like baby chimps and not at all like the sedate and rigidly conforming adult chimpanzee, who hasn't changed much since she was five or six years old.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambi...tion; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The body was still resting on its legs, leaning against the end of the side of the bed, while one of the arms was close clasped ro...und the bed-post. The mouth was rigidly closed, but the eyes were open as though staring at him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
See Social-life and Glee sit down, All joyous and unthinking,... Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown Debauchery and Drinking:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »