Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation…none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
A hint of – dare I say? – animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the “laws.
In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.
That’s what “meaning” is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
Why “revere” the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?
If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.
The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.
The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?
The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?
In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.
I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Once I stand and watch helplessly while some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because his mother finally tells him to stop.
I don’t think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people’s, then that must feel pretty good.
Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.