A Quote by Clive James

Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
It completely sickens me what our culture is doing to women. Last week I wore a big top and little shorts and a bunch of stuff came out saying I was without pants. 'The No-Pants Look,' it said. And I didn't go out without pants, I had shorts on... If Olivia Wilde had gone to a party with a big silky top and little shorts she might have been told her outfit was cute... What it was really: 'Why did you show us your thighs?'
...I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. ...And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents.
Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.
My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.
That this liberty [of the press] is often carried to excess; that it has sometimes degenerated into licentiousness, is seen and lamented, but the remedy has not yet been discovered. Perhaps it is an evil inseparable from the good with which it is allied; perhaps it is a shoot which cannot be stripped from the stalk without wounding vitally the plant from which it is torn. However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America.
I had pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, who were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.
A lot of people are like, "Oh, it's so much easier to be a supermodel now because you have Instagram. You don't even need an agency anymore." But that's just not true. I still had to go to all the castings, I still had to go meet all the photographers, I still had to do all of that to get to where I am now. There wasn't a step taken out just because I had social media. I still have 12-hour days, I still have even 24-hour days sometimes; I still have to do all those things. We don't work any less hard than the '90s models did when they were young.
She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.
I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
I saw a dead elephant in one of Kenya's natural reserves. Around her were footprints of her baby elephant. This was just so sad, as three days before, perhaps the mother was still taking the baby around to play and to drink water. In her mind, she probably was thinking they had a life of decades to be together. However, the poaching happened so fast and everything collapsed. Without the protection of the mother, the baby elephant is likely to die too. That moment changed me.
I hate pants. This is something I have inherited from my father. He despised pants, and my mother was never allowed to wear them at home. We're talking about a different time period now, when the man was much more the ruler of the house. But I still feel that way, and neither my mother nor Maria is allowed to go out with me in pants.
The Pope should not flatter himself about his power nor should he rashly glory in his honor and high estate, because the less he is judged by man, the more he is judged by God. Still the less can the Roman Pontiff glory because he can be judged by men, or rather, can be shown to be already judged, if for example he should wither away into heresy; because he who does not believe is already judged, In such a case it should be said of him: 'If salt should lose its savor, it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trampled under foot by men.'
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.
A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone to school.
the lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional. ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men.
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