Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty--excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandab...le--should persist after the beauty was gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A new talker will often call her caregiver "mommy," which makes parents worry that the child is confused about who is who. She isn...'t. This is a case of limited vocabulary rather than mixed-up identities. When a child has only one word for the female person who takes care of her, calling both of them "mommy" is understandable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we often ask ourselves here despairingly: "What, oh, what is the use of the war? Why can't people live peacefully together? Wh...y all this destruction?" The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?... Oh, why are people so crazy?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do... not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no- quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with y...ou.... It's very selfish, but it's understandable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and mere...ly "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the deep experience of the lonely climb on the mountain of success brings a wealth beyond power to compute. To you all sufferi...ng is understandable and your heart opens wide in sympathy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are and... so makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is bot...h natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of peopl...e who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer--a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »