According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dog...s. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, "Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women of this century are neither idle nor indifferent. They are working with might and main to mitigate the evils which stare... them in the face on every side, but much of their work is without knowledge. It is aimed at the effects, not the cause; it is plucking the spoiled fruit; it is lopping off the poisonous branches of the deadly upas tree, which but makes the root more vigorous in sending out new shoots in every direction. A right understanding of physiological law teaches us that the cause must be removed; the tree must be girdled; the tap-root must be severed. The tap-root of our social upas lies deep down at the very foundations of society. It is woman's dependence. It is woman's subjection. Hence, the first and only efficient work must be to emancipate woman from her enslavement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For rhetoric, he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope;... And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A ...conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mother baseball. I enjoy speculating about its bloody beginnings as a fertility rite. Funny that with all the verbiage about the s...port no one mentions the obvious structural relationship between a baseball stadium and a womb: in design, a stadium is both a circle and a "Y," two notorious female symbols. The curved and sloping shape of the stands is like a plush endometrium in which we fans cozy up to watch a lone batter square off against the universe.... I especially like to think about that when announcers describe players' bats as fast, corked, dead, quiet, live, or as loaded barrels--and pitches as high hard ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fai...l that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing "fixes" a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child's long life ahead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface ... but must pe...netrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A baby nurse is one that changes diapers and loves 'em dearly. Get up at all hours of the night to give 'em the bottle and change ...their pants. If the baby coughs or cries, you have to find out the need. I had my own room usually, but I slept in the same room with the baby. I would take full charge. It was twenty-four hours. I used to have one day a week off and I'd go home and see my own two little ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hannah Hunter: Medicine is the most noble and unselfish-- Col. John Marlowe: Sure, noble profession, noble oath, lanterns hel...d on high--so high they won't admit they're gropin' for.... There was a girl, not much older than that boy in there. I wasn't unfair then, understand. Because they used a lot of fancy words that an ordinary section hand wouldn't understand. So I held her down, while two of them worked on her. I trusted doctors then, believed in 'em, because I was in love, and I didn't want to see her die. A tumor they said it was, and it had to come out right away. So they stuck a leather strap in her mouth so she could bite off her screams, while they cut a way to get in there. And what did they find--nothing! Oh, they were sorry. Sure. They made a mistake. They had something they could talk about before their next little experiment. But what about me. They left me beggin' her not to die. And I lost my wife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself in...voluntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »