Word: mother
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...town that stands up because if it sat down it would rest, and it would think, and if it went to bed it would fall asleep and dream, and it wants neither to think nor to dream, but to divide its time upright, between the two breasts of its mother, one of which gives it alcohol and the other milk. It wants to remain standing up, to forget, forget itself, wear itself out, and to escape by fatigue . . . from that internal questioning that one dares not indulge in, and to which one continually subjects others...
...Hyde Park, "I had no feeling that it belonged to me" because it was dominated by the President's iron-willed mother, Sara, who bossed everybody with a benevolent despotism and frequently overruled Eleanor Roosevelt's decisions. Waiting to move into the White House during the bank panic in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt worried about getting enough money to scrape by. "[Franklin] smiled and said he thought we should be able to manage . . . I began to realize that there were certain things one need not worry about in the White House...
...make appointments to see him. One of them who went to his father for advice was startled to have the President hand him a paper and say: "This is a most important document. I should like to have your opinion on it." The indignant son told his mother: "Never again will I try to talk to father about anything personal...
Live It. James's ghosts represent not so much creatures intended to frighten readers on a lonely evening as obsessive reminders of the experiences his characters have evaded and the responsibilities they have shirked. A girl is haunted by the ghost of her mother's neglected lover; a playwright dreams of a creature who, unlike the actress in the role, knows how to play his heroine; a scruple-torn pacifist meets the stern spirit of his strong-willed military ancestor; a young man abandons his girl friend to consort with the ghost of a woman he has never...
...their product lacks unity and presents the reader with only the haziest notion about the chronology of the Gilbreth tribe's doings. Though father Gilbreth often sounds (and sounds off) like father Day, Cheaper by the Dozen lacks the literary merits of its wise, well-honed predecessor. Mother Gilbreth's firm character is made clear (she still lives in Montclair, runs her husband's business and was 1948's "Woman of the Year"). But the personalities of the twelve Gilbreth children are never created; they remain a vague, boisterous chorus. How little such shortcomings mattered...