Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.
Será que existem duas palavras mais intimamente relacionadas que coragem e covardia? Penso que não existe um homem que não queira possuir a primeira, mas tema ser acusado da segunda. Enquanto uma é co...
Sarai was a lovely woman still, and even after two dozen years he could grow hard if she looked at him a certain way. Sometimes, he wondered about Vistorini, and how he could live a life without a wom...
No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation.
My mother was an excellent woman. Pious, virtuous. Kind. But she was not the intellectual equal of my father. Not by any means. I do not speak of book learning. I speak of a certain innate quality of...
Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer—a scribe of God’s holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at he...
Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.
Let’s go then, I whispered. Let’s go and live, since we have no choice in it.
Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life.
It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his dau...
I pushed the thought away. Doubt was like rot. Excise it at the first speckling, the first stain, the first faint stench of decay. But then—I suppose because my mind was on the wine—I thought of that...
I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gent...
I had come to think that the Wampanoag, who dealt so kindly with their babes, were wiser than we in this. What profit was there in requiring little ones to behave like adults? Why bridle their spirits...
I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man’s duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of...
I felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. Why not, then, another sin?
I do not propose to go on as I have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others.
He saw his daughter as a kind-hearted, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing 'meek' with 'weak.
He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. 'You are like these. Each a trifling speck. A hundred, many hundreds—what matter? Cast them into the...
He did not turn. Embracing his sister, he stepped off the bank, onto the ice. He walked out into the centre, where the ice was thin. His sister’s head lay on his shoulder. They stood there for a momen...
Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices m...