When I started out as a nurse I did so with the highest ideals.... But I found that steady work in my profession--like every woman...'s work in the world--depended upon the giving of myself.... Two-thirds of the physicians I met made a nurse's virtue the price of their influence in getting her steady work. Is it any wonder that I determined to become a member of this privileged sex, if possible?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is complet...ely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stupid or smart, there wasn't much choice about what was going to happen to me ... Growing up was like falling into a hole.... I m...ight not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mi...ndful of tourists have built elaborate "tourist traps" which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the "intrepid tourist." This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder... If from its being kept forever under, The thoughts may not have risen that so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was alone with all that could happen. I began to wonder if the Pedersens had a dog, if the Pedersen kid had a dog or cat maybe a...nd where it was if they did and if I'd known its name and whether it'd come if I called. I tried to think of its name as if it was something I'd forgot. I knew I was all muddled up and scared and crazy and I tried to think god damn over and over or what the hell or jesus christ, instead, but it didn't work. All that could happen was alone with me and I was alone with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most profound effect of World War I on me ... was that it committed me to international affairs as the principal work of my li...fe. ...I have sometimes regretted that my avocation or chief hobby happened to be such a gloomy one. ...When I look at the world today ... I sometimes wonder whether [my efforts] were not nearly all in vain. Perhaps it would have been better if I had adopted as my chief hobby the cultivation of chrysanthemums or the breeding of West Highland White Terriers or even, as did one of my friends, the collection of Japanese swordguards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in women's lives. You never saw men milling around in men's departments. T...hey made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have... done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles,--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheap'ning books, coffee houses, steam of soups from kitchens, pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,--all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, I often shed tears in the Strand from fullness of joy at so much life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sent...imentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »