Important Quotations Explained
1. They were not young. They were not old. They were not, in the girl
sense, beautiful. They were not in the least ferocious. . . . I had the
funniest feeling . . . of being hopelessly in the wrong that I had so often
felt in early youth when my short legs' utmost effort failed to overcome the
fact that I was late to school.
2. [Terry] squared his broad shoulders and lifted his chest. “We do
not allow our women to work. Women are loved—idolized—honored—kept in the
home to care for the children.”
“What is âthe home'?” asked Somel a little wistfully.
But Zava begged: “Tell me first, do no women work, really?”
“Why, yes,” Terry admitted. “Some have to, of the poorer sort.”
“About how many—in your country?”
“About seven or eight million,” said Jeff, as mischievous as
ever.
3. We soon grew to see that mother-love has more than one channel of
expression. I think the reason our children are so—so fully loved, by all of
us, is that we never—any of us—have enough of our own.
4. I found that much, very much, of what I had honestly supposed to
be a physiological necessity was a psychological necessity—or so believed. I
found, after my ideas of what was essential had changed, that my feelings
changed also.
5. When we say
men,
man,
manly,
manhood, and all the other
masculine-derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague
crowded picture of the world and all its activities. . . . And when we say
women, we think
female—the sex.
But to these women . . . the word
woman called up
all that big background, so far as they had gone in social development; and
the word
man meant to them only
male—the
sex.
