Elizabeth Janeway Quotes
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Television. It has changed the way that we perceive the world out there, and though we know that - have indeed been bombarded with analyses on the consequences for society, for the family, and for individual psychology - I don't believe that we have yet begun to appreciate the reach of its subliminal effects, of what we might call 'the slow viruses.' They not only get into our ways of seeing, they pervade the ways in which we weave our perceptions together into patterns that support and explain our thinking and our doing and both direct and hinder various kinds of relationships.
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If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.
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By setting the passenger seat of my car far back, and opening the glove compartment, I nestle in a very large sheet of thick fiberboard. It's big enough to hold a table easel, my big palette and a water container. Winter is not going to lock me indoors!
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We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.
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I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.
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Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
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I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.
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Can one consider controversy without falling into it?
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Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.
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Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.
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We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.
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The greatest barrier to women's advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don't belong out there.
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The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.
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We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.
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The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.
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Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living.
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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
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Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.
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Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.
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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
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Man's world' and 'woman's place' have confronted each other since Scylla first faced Charybdis. ... if women have only a place, clearly the rest of the world must belong to someone else and, therefore, in default of God, to men.
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Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?
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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
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Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a profound connection between human beings.