Sublime

As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is “to be free of other selves.”

“My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air,” Gornick wrote in that memoir.

Attachment research indicates that when a child defies the instinctive urge to want to attach to his or her mother, it is because the mother has been perceived in some important way as unavailable. My basic thesis is that children turn away from Mother out of disappointment and hurt and in self-defense. They turn away because it hurts too much to

Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt.

Something must have snapped inside her, and men seem to sense it, for she isn’t really being pursued by any of them, even though her delicate blond profile has an aristocratic look among the coarse faces, round and red like apples, of the village girls. But these postwar seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds aren’t waiting quietly and patiently,

Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for with her their creative lives blossom; their

It is not your mother who holds dominion over your adult life, but the ideology that proclaims that each of us has been determined in the first hours after birth, or during birth itself, the ideology that proclaims a series of tiny causes and accumulating effects lead to how you are today and how you will affect your own children. You are the

Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with