We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?
The things we hate about ourselves aren’t more real than things we like about ourselves.
Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.
Even if every program were educational and every advertisement bore the seal of approval of the American Dental Association, we would still have a critical problem. It’s not just the programs but the act of watching television hour after hour after hour that’s destructive.
I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals and ignore them at the same time.
The great myth of our work-intense era is ‘quality time.’ We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.
When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.
The truth is that we can overhaul our surroundings, renovate our environment, talk a new game, join a new club, far more easily than we can change the way we respond emotionally. It is easier to change behavior than feelings about that behavior.
We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he’d earned.
The same people who tell us that smoking doesn’t cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn’t cause smoking.
Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that’s too rarely examined.
You can believe in women’s rights without believing that every woman is right.
Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.
Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don’t think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.
What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer’s defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.
The average parent may, for example, plant an artist or fertilize a ballet dancer and end up with a certified public accountant. We cannot train children along chicken wire to make them grow in the right direction. Tying them to stakes is frowned upon, even in Massachusetts.
I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
People have been writing premature obituaries on the women’s movement since its beginning.
Today Washington is our Hollywood, the Senate our Warner Bros., the White House our Beverly Hills. People who never read a line of a movie magazine deal with the lives of leaders as if they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
I rewrite a great deal. I’m always fiddling, always changing something. I’ll write a few words – then I’ll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.