The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the ...patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain--until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we confine ourselves to one life role, no matter how pleasant it seems at first, we starve emotionally and psychologically. We ...need a change and balance in our daily lives. We need sometimes to dress up and sometimes to lie around in torn jeans. . . . Even a grimy factory can afford some relief from a grimy kitchen and vice versa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he had toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some un...heard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive.With one fo...ot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood--never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn--like pioneers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the liste...ner anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining.... If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.... When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like rhetoric, writing is more highly organized than speech. What is more, it prides itself on transcending the boundaries of plac...e and time within which speech must be understood. And writing has propriety. Every writing system seems torn by conflicting impulses. On the one hand it wants to include within its scope all the subjects of language itself. Writing means to be the hard copy of human life. But at the same time every writing scheme has its taboos. Much as writing wants to be inclusive, there are some areas of life it either will not or cannot discuss as well as speech. This propriety is clear in traditional and classical civilizations, where certain themes like personal confession are never entertained in writing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
you show her the two hands that grip each other fiercely,... one being mine, one being yours. Torn right off at the wrist bone when you started in your impossible going, gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
she bit the towel and called on God and I saw her life stretch out . . .... I saw her torn in childbirth, and I saw her, at that moment, in her own death and I knew that she knew.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of ou...r novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Catholic theological tradition is not a series of historically contiguous but different theologies; it is a continuous effort ...in a uniform line. A twentieth-century theologian can go back to the thirteenth or sixteenth and not be in an unknown, strange world. He is quite at home, because it is the very house he is living in today. There is central heating now and electricity, but the fireplaces have not been removed. There are elevators, but the magnificent stairs of the older time are still there. Even the moat can still be seen, though today it is used for flower beds, and the drawbridge is always down.... The Protestant theological house does not follow such a plan; it is really a rambling complex of buildings. At any moment it obeys the dictates of the tastes of the time, but one can see in the whole that there were once other structures where present ones now stand. The older parts have been torn down, though elements thereof were employed in the present erections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »