They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, thr...ough them, had come into final collision. Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition.... Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Indeed, there are no easy correlations between parental ideology, class or race and "successful" child development. Many children ...the world over have revealed a kind of toughness and plasticity that make the determined efforts of some parents to spare their children the slightest pain seem ironic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and desc...ent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, ...we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the shamanesses, the fierce marketwomen of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silkworkers of prerevolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, wh...atever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of Ernest Hemingway, for example, I feel much as I do of Marilyn Monroe, that he was unable to marshal any adequate defense agains...t the painful events of his childhood, and this despite his famous toughness and the courage he could call upon in war, in hunting, in all the dangerous enterprises that seduced him. He was an innocent man, not a naive man, though not always intelligent. Marilyn Monroe offers us a similar paradox. Even when she symbolized an extreme of experience, of sexual knowingness, she took each new circumstance of life, as it came to her or as she sought it, like a newborn babe. And yet this was what made her luminous--her innocence. The glow was not rubbed off her by her experience of the ugliness of life because finally, in some vital depth, she had been untouched by it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the farm I had learned how to meet realities without suffering either mentally or physically. My initiative had never been blun...ted. I had freedom to succeed--freedom to fail. Life on the farm produces a kind of toughness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »