You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger....... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune; an expectation which the child, if j...ustice is done him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that this resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat his proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another man you. One's enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul... to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... after being at the top, I don't think I could play senior tournaments, because you know how good you were. I don't know if I w...ould enjoy that, being half of what I was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every milestone of a firstborn is scrutinized, photographed, recorded, replayed, and retold by doting parents to admiring relative...s and disinterested friends. . . . While subsequent children will strive to keep pace with siblings a few years their senior, the firstborn will always have a seemingly Herculean task of emulating his adult parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents have the right to be themselves. The fact that you were the belle of the ball, the captain of the lacrosse team, the p...resident of your senior class, Phi Beta Kappa, or a political activist doesn't mean that your teenager will be or should be the same....Likewise, the fact that you were a wallflower, uncoordinated, and a C student shouldn't mean that you push your child to be everything you were not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The parent-adolescent relationship is like a partnership in which the senior partner (the parent) has more expertise in many areas... but looks forward to the day when the junior partner (the adolescent) will take over the business of running his or her own life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it not ...a real triumph? I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again. So there is no danger of my repeating myself, and getting to a barrel of sermons, which you must upset, and begin again with.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for bein...g something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »