Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn bet...ween a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.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 »
I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to pre...sent itself to the world as a Scotch banker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the ...rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If ever you prove false to one another, since I have taken such pain to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be calle...d to the world's end after my name; call them all Pandars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction between... our present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Often, when there is a conflict between parent and child, at its very hub is an expectation that the child should be acting differ...ently. Sometimes these expectations run counter what is known about children's growth. They stem from remembering oneself, but usually at a slightly older age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience... of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great leading distinction between writing and speaking is, that more time is allowed for the one than the other, and hence dif...ferent faculties are required for, and different objects attained by each. He is properly the best speaker who can collect together the greatest number of apposite ideas at a moment's warning; he is properly the best writer who can give utterance to the greatest quantity of valuable knowledge in the course of his whole life. The chief requisite for the one, then, appears to be quickness and facility of perception--for the other, patience of soul and a power increasing with the difficulties it has to master. He cannot be denied to be an expert speaker, a lively companion, who is never at a loss for something to say on every occasion or subject that offers. He, by the same rule, will make a respectable writer who, by dint of study, can find out anything good to say upon any one point that has not yet been touched upon before, or who by asking for time, can give the most complete and comprehensive view of any question. The one must be done off-hand, at a single blow; the other can only be done by a repetition of blows, by having time to think and do better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our children do not want models of perfection, neither do they want us to be buddies, friends, or confidants who never rise above ...their own levels of maturity and experience. We need to walk that middle ground between perfection and peerage, between intense meddling and apathy--the middle ground where our values, standards, and expectations can be shared with our children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »