From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

Nancy Mairs

Categorized in : Two Class Different

Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.

our-society use law

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."

being-different differences thinking

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed. by Nancy Mairs

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

lines

You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it. by Nancy Mairs

You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

want order death

If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have... by Nancy Mairs

If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.

baby children ideas

This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

splits crazy god

our lives are stories we tell ourselves. by Nancy Mairs

our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

our-lives stories life

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utt... by Nancy Mairs

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

grammar female

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.

cat girl children