Congratulations is a societal burp that follows a positive act. When you graduate AA, you get a congratulations. When you throw back three bottles of whiskey in one night, you do not. For a species that is interested in furthering its kind, no one wi...
If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel. And if you never have ...
If the people of Old Earth, our ancestors and their descendants today who remain, could keep building, could keep trying, how can we do less? We are their children, and while we bought to the stars with us all the faults and the problems and the flaw...
We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneious reactions-we teach them not to rock the societal boat...By the time she is thirty, the valient little girl's "Ick!"-her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's action...
Raynor slapped her so hard her teeth rattled and eyes stung, but she refused to react except to say saucily, "You must have heard how I like foreplay." "I hope you like it a lot, because with your mouth, you'll be getting it nonstop." "Goody," she sa...
We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did—a reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor.
Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different...
Church has believed that parents probably wont' assume responsibility for their own children's growth, so they have tried to become a parent substitute. This in turn ha s fostered parents to adopt a "drop-off" mentality. Maybe the greatest gift a chu...
That, they never could lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never endure the notion of their children laying their heads on their pillows; ...
When we see everyone the way God sees them, all their frailties and weaknesses as well as their strengths,we can learn to treat them tenderly. We must also view ourselves from God's perspective: lovingly, tenderly, and patiently. We can do the same w...
Secret ceremonies in which malevolent men and women cloaked in hooded robes, hiding behind painted faces and chanting demonic incantations while inflicting sadistic wounds on innocent children lying on makeshift alters, or tied to inverted crosses, s...
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mou...
Children need to see that they are part of a history and that the story of their family is a living thing. God tells it, a new story in each generation, and each must hold hands across the sea of time, joining together the ones who went before and th...
What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? And what if both men and women became responsible for ...
It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can be...
How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater th...
What wild undisturbed corners do you leave within you or within your partner, your children, your parents, your closest friends? What is left respectfully and quietly for passive cultivation, for privacy, for the imagination, for discovery, for seren...
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a coupl...
It would take more than long-stemmed roses to change my view that you're a despicable cowardy custard and a disgrace to a proud family. Your ancestors fought in the Crusades and were often mentioned in despatches, and you cringe like a salted snail a...
There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who...
I love you with everything I am, everything I've been, and everything I hope to be. I love you with my past, and I love you for my future. I love you for the children we'll have and for the years we'll have together. I love you for every one of my sm...
