“My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.”
Magistrate: “If you hadn’t shut up you’d have got a beating!”
Lysistrata: “Well, that’s why I did shut up—then. But later on we began to hear about even worse decisions you’d made, and then we would ask, ‘Husband, how come you’re handling this so stupidly?’ And right away he’d glare at me and tell me to get back to my sewing if I didn’t want major damage to my head: ‘War shall be the business of menfolk,’ unquote.”
″...sometimes there comes a time in a man’s life when fate has beaten him so that he must bow his head and decide that he must eat his pride so that his family may eat bread.”