Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you come back again and again.
The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.
With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities.
Britons put up with, Americans fix, Canadians cope.
Be who you really are, do what you want to do, in order to have what you really want.
As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.
It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class in society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific.
Maleness in America is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and re-earned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.
In our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.
I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples – faraway peoples – so that Americans might better understand themselves.
I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.
Through a grandmother’s voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.
Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.
An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists.
You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.
If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.
If sports are the toy department of life, then the NFL is the FAO Schwartz of sports.
The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as – carried too far – one of its weaknesses.
The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.
No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.