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Quote by Ellen Goodman

“The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.”

Quote by Ellen Goodman

Author

Ellen Goodman is an American journalist renowned for her column writing in newspapers and magazines. Born on April 11, 1941, she has had a career spanning multiple fields, including politics, social issues, and the environment. more

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“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”

“To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.”

Ifs Thinking Mind States Fighting House Doors Fronts Organization Oppression Thoughtful Abandon State Of Mind Sane Freedom Of Speech Back Doors

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?”

Men Real Existence Aging Debt Collections Estates Monotony

Book:The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos

Source: The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos

“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”

Source: Occasions and protests

“Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?”

Source: The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos

“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”

Thinking World Way Writing Stills Three Speech Paper Discovery Aspect Originals Invention Prose Originality Three Words Professional Writing

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.”

Source: The Ground We Stand on: The History of a Political Creed

“Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.”

“In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.”

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.”

Men Book Seems Imagination White Rooms Creativity Creation Adventure Needed Safe Mood Enormous Heat Complexity Prose Reckless Fluid Fuse Seething

Author:John Dos Passos