The more supple vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go int...o his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed.... He especially is the creature of the occasion. He empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day. He dearly loves the social slush. There is no reserve of soberness in him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These... may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with the mere pellicle of the globe on which we live.... We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been sitting in my mother's house in a small town in Rhode Island watching the Miss America Pageant, as we always did. After... the telecast, I went into the kitchen with my bathrobe tied around by neck singing, "Therrrre She Is, Miss A-mer-i-caaa!" And that very next year I was there on that stage, with God knows how many people watching, and millions of seventeen-year-old women sitting in their living rooms watching the Miss America Pageant. Well, I was so emotionally touched by the whole moment that I was hysterical crying! That I was there, and that there were millions of people watching me, dreaming about doing it someday.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... that's what living happens to be ... the physiological denial of reverence and good manners and Christianity.... At your age o...ne's quite old enough to know what the essence of life really is. Shamelessness, that's all; pure shamelessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to ...(the square root of 300), or about seventeen years and a half, when--that is, in 1917Mit would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only (the square root of 17.5), or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adults understandably assume that the level of verbal proficiency a five-year-old displays represents his level of proficiency in ...all areas of functioning--if he talks like an adult, he must think and feel like one. However, five-year-olds,... belie the promise of adult-like behavior with their child-like, impulsive actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child ...relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has... turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »