Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...no matter what happened, no one could take our heritage away from us. This heritage meant that we had strong bodies, pride, and... will power. We could never get so poor that we couldn't work our way out. Through droughts, floods, and tornadoes we could stick and work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certain ...irreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To long for that which comes not. To lie a-bed and sleep not. To serve well and please not. To have a horse that goes not. To have... a man obeys not. To lie in jail and hope not. To be sick and recover not. To lose one's way and know not. To wait at door and enter not, and to have a friend we trust not: are ten such spites as hell hath not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Staying in charge as a mother means exercising one's own judgment about what is best for one's child. It means, at times, disregar...ding the advice of experts. It means fighting one's way into institutional decision making in an effort to make it responsive to the needs of one's own child. It means trusting one's own point of view. Most of all, it means developing the ability to tolerate both the internal anxiety and the external hostility that are generated when one tries to stay in charge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents find many different ways to work their way through the assertiveness of their two-year-olds, but seeing that assertiveness... as positive energy being directed toward growth as a competent individual may open up some new possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Recreation carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose. However pleasurable this antidote to work may be, it's a form of acti...ve employment, engaged in with a specific end in mind--a refreshment of the spirit, or the body, or both. Implicit in this idea of renewal--usually organized renewal--is the notion that recreation is a consequence of work and a preparation for more of it.... Leisure is not tied to work the way that recreation is--leisure is self-contained. The root of the word is the Latin licere which means "to be permitted," suggesting that leisure is about freedom. But freedom for what? According to Chesterton's cheerful view, leisure was above all an opportunity to do nothing. When he said "doing nothing," however, he was describing not emptiness but an occasion for reflection and contemplation, a chance to look inward rather than outward.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »