Adolescents do get very angry with their parents, and acknowledging this anger is part of acknowledging them. If the anger is not ...acknowledged then its expression is increased. The parent seems super-strong. The adolescent tries to become the super-attacker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret su...per-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived...I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is odd that the NCAA would place a school on probation for driving an athlete to class, or providing a loan, but would have no ...penalty for a school that violates Title IX, a federal law.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are so... sure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science has done great things for us; it has also pushed us hopelessly back. For, not content with filling its own place, it has t...ried to supersede everything else. It has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Athletes and actors--let actors stand for the set of performing artists--share much. They share the need to make gesture as fluid ...and economical as possible, to make out of a welter of choices the single, precisely right one. They share the need for impeccable and split-second timing. They share the need for thousands of hours of practice in order to train the body to become the perfect, instinctive instrument to express. Both athlete and actor, out of that congeries of emotion, choice, strategy, knowledge of terrain, mood of spectators, condition of spectators in the ensemble, secret awareness of injury or weakness, and as nearly an absolute concentration as possible so that all externalities are integrated, all distraction absorbed to the self, must be able to change the self so successfully that it changes us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the... spiritual athlete must crash through.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand, he was in deep depression and had written little of value for a long time. Scott Fitzg...erald, when he died, regarded by the world as a failure, was fighting his drink problem successfully, and was doggedly in the middle of The Last Tycoon, whose quality clearly confirms that his genius was intact. Who was the failure, who the hero? A writer is not an athlete, not a civic leader, not a politician; his personality may be flawed and his life a ruin, but the one fight that defines him is the fight to stay with his work, and not to betray it. On those terms, "poor Scott" was battling in the arena to the end, and his pathos is not the pathos of failure, but the pathos of greatness; and that greatness grows year by year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »