It was always the work that was the gyroscope in my life. I don't know who could have lived with me. As an architect you're absolu...tely devoured. A woman's cast in a lot of roles and a man isn't. I couldn't be an architect and be a wife and mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The foolish fears of what might happen. I cast them all away... Among the clover-scented grass, Among the new-mown hay, Among the husking of the corn, Where drowsy poppies nod Where ill thoughts die and good are born-- Out in the fields with God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to st...rive except for one's own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to fe...el as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage--the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politenesses.... But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do ...we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,--to live on an inclined plane.... I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,--nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,--and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddli...ng yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light.... Few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the people over here are coming to realize what would happen if Germany and Italy won a European war. We would be out of t...he picture entirely.... If I were a German conqueror what would I do? Obviously I would have the British navy out of the way and the French army out of the way.... The first thing I would do is look around and say, "What outside territories do I want to take for myself?"... We are not quite ready to take on the United States but we can do it by indirection very nicely. We are going to dominate South America ... without violating the Monroe Doctrine. [FDR set forth a scenario of economic domination of Latin America by giving Argentina a choice of agreeing to German domination of its army by economic blackmail by virtue of the fact that Germany controlled all the agricultural markets in Europe on which Argentina depended for livelihood and the same for Brazil.] It is a perfectly open and shut thing and, if you have the complete, physical power to do it, you win.... [F]rom Hitler's point of view, it is rational. And, if any of us were in his place, with his methods, we would do it. I made myself a hump-back, dyed my skin in several places with great spots of yellow; so that, when I look'd in the glass, I was almost frighten'd at my own figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as muc...h money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »