Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For most people their ideal life involves an intimate relationship with another person; one which often has a sexual basis. But there's no logic about it; why shouldn't people choose to live together with someone they just like? 'Of course' if we were too unquestioning about it, and we said 'well, that person has got to be someone of the opposite sex, and it's got to be for life, and divorce is terrible', then we're stuck. But if you don't recognize the importance that kind of bond has for human beings - you can't really understand what is needed to live a good life.
My mom was a manic depressive schizophrenic who, after a year in prison, went home and shot herself. My sister, Kirsten, an amazing poet, who was raised by this woman, and was dating a guy who broke up with her for the fourth time in three weeks. And one day, she came to his house, got a gun, and blew her brains out all over his headboard. I just went through a divorce, five years in court and cost me $2 million dollars. If anyone, by law, should be forced to take antidepressants it's me... But instead, I choose to be an antidepressant. And you can take me with alcohol.
I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.
But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.
The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of "intellectuals" from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice -- all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole.
Ceremony assists people to adjust to change (a marriage ceremony does this for families), to recognize achievement (a classic example is a graduation ceremony), to relate, to express love, and/or to establish a relationship. Ceremonies are the human way we have to signpost a deal such as a business merger, to trigger off a healthy grief process (such as in divorce or funeral ceremonies), to welcome another human being into the family. So Ceremonies have these excellent effects - they can be used further to announce intentions, to express loyalty and to reinforce a sense of identity.
The woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. Spiritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as--what it is fast becoming--an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures.
