Carol Shields Quotes

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.

Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.

Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.

We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want.

So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.

A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.

Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.

For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world

Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.

In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.

Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

What I'd like is a lobotomy, a clean job, the top of my head neatly sawn off and designated contents removed.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breast full of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs?

And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.

I don't know how to get things started... It's like there's this great big wheel I've got to start rolling only I don't seem to have the muscles to get it going.

His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures

Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control.

Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies – birth, love, and death – are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!

How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.

Time and chance. The twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.

It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.

To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it.  It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

Boiled down, isn't love just a form of vanity? You know, the wish to be adored. To be the absolute center for someone else.

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of us would see as ordinary responsible behavior.

I was the breakable one. Women always are. It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you're drowning.

…it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.

...she herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. "I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.

When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forbears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken „dedication“ and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual „inspiration“. But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be sexual or psychological – or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygene and energy – has the power to turn us from our path.

This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.

It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence—the way in which there is no single truth about anyone’s life, but as many truths as there are observers.

Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren't really, they weren't allowed to be.

He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can't comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course.

Nothing matters except for the harvest, the gathering in, the adding up, the bringing together, the whole story, the way it happens and happens and goes on happening. (from "Collision")

Love is not, anywhere, taken seriously. It's not respected. It's the one thing in the world everyone wants, but for some reason people are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and foolish.

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

It's like concentrating on your own breath: once you start thinking about the air rushing in and out of your body, your breath has a way of getting stuck in your throat so that you understand how easy it would be to fall down and die.

He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train – with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light.

A glance can both submit and subvert; it can be sharp or shy, scornful or adoring; it can be a near cousin to scrutiny – but it almost always assumes a degree of mutually encoded knowledge. A spark is struck and apprehended; the head turns on it's spinal axis; the shoulders freeze; the eyes are the only busy part of the body, simultaneously receiving and sending out information, so that a glance becomes more than a glance. It is a weapon, a command, or a sigh of acquiescence.

I've had lots of happy moments. I've been lucky. But I always think the happiest moment hasn't happened yet. I'm talking about the queen of happy moments. The biggie. The unfathomable. The epitome of happiness. The only thing is, I worry that when it comes along I won't recognize it. It'll be flashing away there at the edge of my vision and I'll be looking so hard that I'll just let it float right by.

Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.

Cuando llegue el momento de mi lobotomía, ése es uno de los incidentes sociales que me propongo eliminar.

‟Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.

These hips are mighty hips. These hips are magic hips. I have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top

Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness—it’s too good, you see, too stupidly good.

I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)

The men, her husband and sons, leave for the quarry at seven o'clock sharp and return at five. What do they imagine she does all day? It makes her shiver to think of it, how not one pair of eyes can see through the roof and walls of her house and regard her as she moves through her dreamlike days, bargaining from minute to minute with indolence, that tempter.

Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner.

This was during a period in my reading life when I was given to understand that "relating" to the fictional characters or situation was of prime importance, and so I read, I'm sorry to say, narrowly, frugally, unadventurously, as though I had no interest in the greater world and no desire to experience other cycles of thinking and being. This idea of "relating", or identifying, was encouraged by my teachers and even, I believe, by the critical theories of the day. Naive as it may sound, one read fiction in order to confirm the reality of one's experience.

His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.

I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain. And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls. Wasn’t I beautiful Wasn’t I fragrant and young? Look at me now.

I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even with it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.

Either we're all ordinary, or else none of us is ordinary.

عصبانیت ، به انسان تر شدن کمک نمیکند.تمرینی است برای نمایشی که هرگز اجرا نخواهد شد.

Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs.

Whenever I meet anyone new, I don't say, "Tell me about your belief system." I say, "Tell me about your average day".

I am not at peace.' Daisy Goodwill's final (unspoken) words.

It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation.

From surfeit to loss is a short line.

People who work in libraries, like those in bakeshops, ought to be made peaceful and happy by their surroundings, but they almost never are.

He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.

In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious—unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer’s life can be distressing—negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers—disappointment with one’s own work, on a daily/hourly basis!—it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?

It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though he had found his true tongue. He cannot imagine, thinking back, why he had believed himself incapable of passionate expression.

the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man’s creation of God being exactly equal to God’s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven.

Dorrie gave Larry's hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they'd chosen or which had chosen them.

I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you've been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.

Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence.

The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns.

He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn't. It sat out in the open like anything else.

Learning to skip has brought control into her life. Whenever she feels at all sad she switches into this wholly happy gait, sliding, hopping, and sliding again; when doing this, it seems as though her head separates from her body, making her feel dizzy and emptied out of bad thoughts. Does anyone else in the world know this trick, she wonders. Probably not, though her mother sometimes waves at her from the window, waves and smiles.

He had been relfecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again. And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led.

I'm always interested in how characters change and how they often act inconsistently. When people teach creative writing courses, one of the first things they teach is to keep your characters consistent. And this is bad advice because human beings are not consistent. The very moments that we're interested in are those moments in which they act inconsistently, out of character. They suddenly leap up. They can become larger than they really are. I'm interested in those moments.

I reminded the reporter that sonnet means “little sound.” “Oh,” she said, and I could tell by the way her pen jumped in her hand that she was charmed by the idea; people almost always are. Sonnets are taken so strenuously, so literally, when taught at school, or at least they used to be, and the definition—fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter—hardens and ends up gesturing toward an artifact, an object one might construct from a kit. But if you picture the sonnet, instead, as a little sound, a ping in the great wide silent world, you make visible a sudden fluidity to the form, a splash of noise, but a carefully measured splash that’s saved from preciosity by the fact that it comes from within the body’s own borders; one voice, one small note extended, and then bent; the bending is everything, the volta, the turn, and also important is where it occurs within the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground,” to quote old Wordsworth. From there the “little sound” sparks and then forms itself out of the dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

Muistatko sen päivän viime lokakuussa, kun minulla oli ensimmäisen kerran kauhea päänsärky? Löysin sinut keittiöstä, sinulla oli sellainen uusi kammottava muoviesiliina. Sinä kiedoit heti käsivartesi minun ympärilleni ja silitit minun ohimoitani. Sillä hetkellä minä rakastin sinua suunnattomasti. Esiliinan natina minun syliäni vasten oli kuin liikuttava vastaus siihen kaipuuseen, jota minä silloinkin tunsin. Oli kuin jokin olisi kuiskimalla kehottanut meitä kiirehtimään, lopettamaan ajan haaskaamisen, ja minä olisin halunnut tanssia sinun kanssasi takaovesta ulos puutarhaan, kadulle, kauas horisonttiin. Voi minun rakkaani. Minä luulin että meillä olisi ollut enemmän aikaa.

She has confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that as burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says to see men and women - though, oddly, they mostly women - tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university's records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. all they want is for their to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary.” A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme—so whimsical, sensual, and urgent—that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn’t had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco—glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls—was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term “flower children” would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam.

Now that we've come up with all the obvious answers to our problem, it's time to come up with some truly ridiculous ones." "Ridiculous?" asked Brasque. "Yes, ridiculous. Think of something impossible, improbable or downright ridiculous and go from there." "Like we all flap our arms and fly out of here," said Katherine. "Exactly!" said Spider. "How about we form a long line all the way to the mountains and pass the charges along it?" said Brasque. "Excellent," said Spider. "Keep it coming." "What if we each carry one charge, run back, carry another, and so on?" said Tom, getting into the swing of things. "Lovely!" laughed Spider. "Now we're cooking." The shower of sparks shot out of the top of the Amadragon. Joe shielded his eyes with his hand. "Yeah, and we can all climb on the Amadragon and ride out of here," he said. "What was that, Joe?" said Spider, suddenly dropping the jokey manner. "What's the Amadragon?" Katherine's eyes glittered. "He means that," she said, pointing at the excavator. Everyone except Spider turned and looked. "He's talking about the giant machine, the one that keeps shooting sparks in the air." Spider cocked his ear and listened to the rumble of the Amadragon's engine. "So Orlemann built the dragon, did he?" he said. "I'd been wondering what the noise was. If they built it to the original specifications, it should get us out of here within an hour. Let's pray that will give us enough time!

Almost everyone agrees with her. However much they look into her eyes and think she is uttering mere niceties, they are sworn to that ultimate courtesy, which is to believe what people want us to believe. And thus, when Mrs. Willow bids them good afternoon, they courteously rise to their feet. “Good afternoon,” they smile back, shaking hands carefully, and postponing their slow, rhythmic applause and the smashing of the teacups.

It just seems our species is happier when we are good. Goodness is not guaranteed. A life of principle requires practice…. from Unless, a novel by Carol Shields

A bedjacket speaks of desperation, and what it says is: toodle-oo.

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes, as though my thoughts hissed and spat on my scalp. My bride’s breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged. There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified? Be terrified. It’s you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone. I glanced at a buzzing bee, a dull grey pebble fell to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down. I looked at a ginger cat, a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit. I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain. And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls. Wasn’t I beautiful? Wasn’t I fragrant and young? Look at me now. - Medusa by Carol Ann Duffy -

My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she’s over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.

Years ago, when people would ask "What are you into?", an easy answer was, "Things that start with "F"....film, food, fabric....etc. wink wink." I am a voice of my generation, beginning in the 1940s and continuing until the present. I have lived in remarkable times and have met and befriended remarkable people. I didn't make these connections out of ambition. I'm adventurous but I'm also practical. Usually, I was just looking for a job and ended up with amazing people with great work ethics. I spent much of my time behind the scenes with people of substance, even genius. Practicality can lead you to magic. I am convinced that each person has an amazing story, whether told through a novel like Carol Shields' "The Stone Diaries" or described in terrifying detail in "Anne Frank's Diary". I was young in the time of extraordinary change in America, post-war and into the '60s and lo and behold, things have been changing rapidly ever since. I'm telling this story because I feel proud and grateful to have witnessed, and even taken part in, many moments of change and beauty. I hope I'm talking to young women who will see that your life's journey doesn't have to be planned, that you can stay open and resilient and let nothing bring you down. F*Words

Good grief," Michael said as he sat down in one of the 64 enormous upholstered chairs. "My feet don't even think about touching the floor." "This table is longer than the bowling alley," Trent said. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered down the long wooden table as though he couldn't see the other end. "If you wanted someone to pass you the salt shaker it would take thirty minutes for it to get here," Wendy agreed.

Dar a obosit să mai fie tristă și a obosit să nu-i mai pese că e tristă, să nu mai știe măcar că e tristă, într-un fel. Și în capul ei ca o cutie mica și osoasa înțelege și acceptă faptul că imensa ei nefericire e sortita să rămână lipsită de însemnătate. Deja, chiar în clipa asta, sunt încredințată că o parte din ea vrea să se întoarcă la lucrurile care îi plăceau, să simtă cum o nouă periuță de dinți îi atinge gingiile, de exemplu. Un lucru mărunt ca asta. Ar vrea sa-și lege din nou la brâu un șorț curat și apretat, să curețe jumătate de kilogram de cartofi în trei minute și să îi pună la înmuiat în apă rece. Să lustruiască un borcan de jeleu și să-l pună pe raftul de sus, lângă tovarășii lui. Să lingă cu limba un plic, să-i lipească un timbru într-un colt, să-l pună la cutia cu scrisori. Ar vrea să își curețe trupul cu o rafala de râsete și să cedeze forței gravitaționale. Se va întâmpla. Toată suferința va fi dată la o parte. Din clipă în clipă

Practically all girls are capable of pulling off the Lady Love stunt before marriage but alas, only too many of them think a wedding ring gives them the right to flop down on the do-nothing stool, get fat and eat onions... When a man see his beauteous pride slouching around the house in a soiled house- coat with cold cream on her face, he feels he got cheated at the altar. Too often after the first baby, [women] cease being wives and are only mothers... giving all their tenderness to Junior and letting poor husband go heart-hungry.