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 »
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 »
Families suffered badly under industrialization, but they survived, and the lives of men, women, and children improved. Children, ...once marginal and exploited figures, have moved to a position of greater protection and respect,... The historic decline in the overall death rates for children is an astonishing social fact, notwithstanding the disgraceful infant mortality figures for the poor and minorities. Like the decline in death from childbirth for women, this is a stunning achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's just a game--baseball--an amusement, a marginal thing, not an art, not a consequential metaphor for life, not a public trust.... It may have broken Bart Giamatti's sentimental heart, but it will never break mine.... In its behind-the-scenes machinations as sport, baseball has developed unexpected ties to big-time professional wrestling, with that strange spectacle's buffoonish, self-important, overstuffed Steinbrennerish management types spouting gibberish about the best interests of this and such and the need for moral direction, all in counterpoise to sullenly big-muscled, bad-boy superstars nattering and snuffling about not getting any respect and not being in it for the dough, and being in it for the dough.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 »
In realms of knowledge, we bequeath our books, And woe pursue who to a master quotes... The funnier of our witty marginal notes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American wr...iter aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »