Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.
Marriage was all a woman’s idea and for man’s acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.
What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.
Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman’s business. The institution was invented to do her homage; it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such – as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association – the going will be hard indeed.
I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.
Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath Conviction’s roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind.
Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.
The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
Women are not men’s equals in anything except responsibility. We are not their inferiors, either, or even their superiors. We are quite simply different races.
Marriage is a lot of things-an alliance, a sacrament, a comedy, or a mistake; but it is definitely not a partnership because that implies equal gain. And every right-thinking woman knows the profit in matrimony is by all odds hers.
Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one’s neighbor.
O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.