Quotations About / On: WORK

Parenting can be established as a time-share job, but mothers are less good "switching off" their parent identity and turning to something else. Many women envy the father's ability to set clear boundaries between home and work, between being an on-duty and an off-duty parent.... Women work very hard to maintain a closeness to their child. Father's value intimacy with a child, but often do not know how to work to maintain it.

... idleness is an evil. I don't think man can maintain his balance or sanity in idleness. Human beings must work to create some coherence. You do it only through work and through love. And you can only count on work.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Black women ... work because their husbands can't make enough money at their jobs to keep everything going.... They don't go to work to find fulfillment, or adventure, or glamour and romance, like so many white women think they are doing. Black women work out of necessity.

Your children get a lot of good stuff out of your work...They benefit from the tales you tell over dinner. They learn from the things you explain to them about what you do. They brag about you at school. They learn that work is interesting, that it has dignity, that it is necessary and pleasing, and that it is a perfectly natural thing for both mothers and fathers to do...Your work enriches your children more than it deprives them.

We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a "life-work" of teaching, of social work—we know that we would lay it down with hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.

You see, after the war—and don't forget it lasted a hundred years—thousands of us went from door to door, asking for honest work, and we were whipped for begging. The ruling class didn't say, "Work or starve." They said "Starve, for you shall not work."

Employees from families where all adults work are still coping with rules and conditions of work designed, as one observer put it, to the specifications of Ozzie and Harriet. These conditions include rigid adherence to a 40-hour workweek, a concept of career path inconsistent with the left cycle of a person with serious family responsibilities, notions of equity formed in a different era, and performance evaluation systems that confuse effort with results by equating hours of work with productivity.

Hard work. Well, that's all right for people who don't know how to do anything else. It's all right for people who aren't lucky. But once you're lucky, you don't have to work for other people. You make them work for you.