Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one. —Ellen Key More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
A great deal in life depends on who smacked your hand at breakfast when you were a child. —Krzysztof Kieślowski More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. —Kelly Miller More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. —Clarence Budington Kelland More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage. —James Lee Burke More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before. —Alice Walker More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
God help all children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage cans of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to odds and ends that will mess them up for all time, or hating the trash so much they will waste their future on the hatred. —Lillian Hellman More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later . . . that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. —Tom Wolfe More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world. —Sylvia Plath More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of tv soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms! —Erica Jong More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
It seems that it is only the recent West that has deemed it unnecessary to "initiate" young men. Otherwise, culture after culture felt that if the young man were not introduced to "the mysteries," he would not know what to do with his pain and would almost always abuse his power. It looks like they were right. —Richard Rohr More about this quote Tags: mystery pain men culture initiation Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
I don't want to be a man," said Jace. "I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead." "Well," said Luke, "you're doing a fantastic job. —Cassandra Clare More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that . . . adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money. . . . For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents? —Thomas Szasz More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands — literally thousands — of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. —Nick Hornby More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn-out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man . . . which he received in high school do not work in life. —Robert Bly More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email