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"I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster."
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"Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Most parents are not really 'supportive' because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they 'support' their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures - in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Nature attunes children to receive the coded messages that parents issue how to live a joyful and virtuous life."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Spanking a child is about the parent not the child. The child will learn more from positive correction than physical manipulation."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A child learns to be guilty when he is punished and scolded for damaging material objects."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting."
Emotion


"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."
Illness


"It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no."
Resilience


"I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls."
Art


"No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself."
Memory


"In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later."
Perception


"In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard."
Society


"But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies."
Reality


"Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover."
Ideology


"When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics."
Sexuality
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