Awareness of having better things to do with their lives is the secret to immunizing our children against false values--whether pr...esented on television or in "real life." The child who finds fulfillment in music or reading or cooking or swimming or writing or drawing is not as easily convinced that he needs recognition or power or some "high" to feel worthwhile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and onely declare me to be dead, but win me, a...nd overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good versi...on. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mead had studied for the ministry, but had lost his faith and took great delight in blasphemy. Capt. Charles H. Frady, pioneer mis...sionary, held a meeting here and brought Mead back into the fold. He then became so devout that, one Sunday, when he happened upon a swimming party, he shot at the people in the river, and threatened to kill anyone he again caught desecrating the Sabbath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was a young girl salmon fishing with my father in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State I used to lean out over t...he water and try to look past my own face, past the reflection of the boat, past the sun and darkness, down to where the fish were surely swimming. I made up charm songs and word-hopes to tempt the fish, to cause them to mean biting my hook. I believed they would do it if I asked them well and patiently and with the right hope. I am writing my poems like this. I have used the fabric and the people of my life as the bait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning..., theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »