Belinda Brown
Men and boys are constantly portrayed as predatory, sexist, their sense of humor is vilified, and their behavior is regarded as unacceptable. Factor in the constant diet we are fed to men as perpetrators of rape, murder, and domestic violence. Boys must wonder whether they will ever be able to do anything right. This must make it painfully difficult for young men and women to build up relations based on honesty, love, and trust.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any woman in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralizing.
Charles Bukowski
- Women
I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me feel uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.
Herman Melville
- Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had be been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.
Patricia Highsmith
- Carol
Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were grey, colourless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away.
Steven Pinker
- The Language Instinct
If we divide language development into somewhat arbitrary stages, like Syllable Babbling, Gibberish Babbling, One-Word Utterances, and Two-Word Strings, the next stage would have to be called All Hell Breaks Loose. Between the late twos and the mid-threes, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
- On Love
Love ... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and binds himself for ever to the object of his passion.
Martin Parrott
- Grammar for English Language Teachers: Second edition
We use prepositions differently according to where we come from and what kinds of people we usually talk to. What is standard in Britain is not necessarily standard in other English-speaking countries - for example in the USA 'through' is used in place of 'till' and 'until' ('through Friday'), 'than' is often used after 'different' ('different than'), and often there is no preposition used before days of the week ('I'll see you Monday').
Peter K Austin
- 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues
Welsh is one of the Brittonic sub-group of Celtic languages, which includes Cornish and Breton. It is spoken by more than 600,000 people in Wales and by 100,000 or more in England. It is the only Celtic language not seriously under threat. The language has long been used in religion and education, and laws dating from 1964 onwards now give it a position of equal validity to English in Wales.
Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudgill
- English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles
When foreign learners of English first come to the British Isles, they are usually surprised (and dismayed) to discover how little they understand of the English they hear. For one thing, people seem to speak faster than expected. For another, the English that most people speak seems to be different in many ways from the English they have learned. While it is probably differences of pronunciation that will immediately strike them, learners may also notice differences of grammar and vocabulary.
Maria Constantino
- Weather: A Guide to Earth's Weather and Climate
An air mass is a body of air that covers most of a continent or ocean and has uniform characteristics that it acquires from the Earth's surface below. Air over a continental land mass will be drier than air over the ocean, and it will be warmer in the summer and cooler in the winter because of the different rates at which the land and the sea warm up and cool down. Once it has taken on these characteristics, the body of air becomes an air mass.
Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno
- Bread: Baking by Hand or Bread Machine
Essential for an open-textured, full-flavoured bread, kneading performs a crucial function in preparing a dough to rise. First, it completes the mixing process by distributing the activated yeast throughout the dough. Continued kneading then allows the flour's proteins to develop into gluten, which gives dough the ability to stretch and expand. Starches are broken down to feed the yeast, which creates bubbles of carbon dioxide gas. These bubbles cause the dough to rise.
