A woman can get marries and her life does change. And a man can get married and his life changes. But nothing changes life as dram...atically as having a child. . . . In this country, it is a particular experience, a rite of passage, if you will, that is unsupported for the most part, and rather ignored. Somebody will send you a couple of presents for the baby, but people do not acknowledge the massive experience to the parents involved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O ship white-sailed of Crete,... you brought my mistress from her quiet palace through breaker and crash of surf to love-rite of unhappiness!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and respons...ibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat ga...udy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable clas...s of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passag...e. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from the... sleep of passions to their rage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he Congregational minister in a neighboring town definitely stated that 'the same spirit which drove the herd of swine into the... sea drove the Baptists into the water, and that they were hurried along by the devil until the rite was performed.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »