Unpaid Quotes

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid ... initially and my own stories. ~ Peter Morgan

A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence--the lapses of consciousness, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand [...] At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive. ~ Jon Krakauer

Money rules the world, and doubtless also, here and there, the bit of love within it, and when love turns to hate, one remembers unpaid board. ~ Robert Walser

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true
it must be true
but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires. ~ Sherman Alexie

They decided that unpaid leave could only be granted through the decision of a council that consisted almost entirely of scientists who couldn't understand my reasons for wanting to go so. They said no, no unpaid. So I immediately resigned. ~ George Woodcock

The least dignified thing that can happen to a man is to be murdered. If he dies in his sleep he gets a respectful obituary and perhaps a smiling portrait; it is how we all want to be remembered. But murder is the great exposer: here is the victim in his torn underwear, face down on the floor, unpaid bills on his dresser, a meager shopping list, some loose change, and worst of all the fact that he is alone. Investigation reveals what he did that day - it all matters - his habits are examined, his behavior scrutinized, his trunks rifled, and a balance sheet is drawn up at the hospital giving the contents of his stomach. Dying, the last private act we perform, is made public: the murder victim has no secrets. ~ Paul Theroux

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Die in the desert! Not I! With a new vision, I saw the things that I must do. First I would go back to Babylon and face every man to whom I owed an unpaid debt. I should tell them that after years of wandering and misfortune, I had come back to pay my debts as fast as God would permit. Next I should make a home for my wife and become a citizen of whom my parents should be proud. "My debts were my enemies, but the men I owed were my friends for they had trusted me and believed in me. ~ George S. Clason

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. ~ Bill Keller

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit - and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it. ~ Ayn Rand

I tried. As the darkness closed over me, I fought to remember the name of my husband.
I fought to remember the name of someone I had loved.
I fought to remember
What?
I was alone, and I had no hands to clench around my memories. I had no memories, no name, only the knowlegde (deeper and colder than any darkness) that I had lost what I loved more than life.
And then I forgot I had lost it.
Time unwound. Prices were unpaid.
The world changed. ~ Rosamund Hodge

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation. ~ Clay Shirky

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?"

That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art.

The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even ~ Ariel Gore

The First Lady is an unpaid public servant elected by one person - her husband. ~ Lady Bird Johnson

The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work. ~ Jeanne Boydston

There's a room in my heart full of unpaid bills. We all have one. It's useful to go in occasionally and open a few. ~ Rachel Hartman

When I was in employment as a regular line pilot, I used to take unpaid leave to go on tour with Iron Maiden. I got lucky - they let me off ~ Bruce Dickinson

Rodriguez, in addition to the pleasant glow in the mind that comes from a generous action, had another feeling that gives all of us pleasure, a feeling of increased safety; for while he had the ring upon his finger and Morano went unpaid the thought could not help occurring, even to a generous mind, that one of these windy nights Morano might come for his wages. ~ Lord Dunsany

The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river
it's in the pores of the place
but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches.
This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes. ~ Stephen King

Unpaid work never commands respect; it is the paid worker who has brought to the public mind conviction of woman's worth. ~ Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch

Anyone who does anything useful will not go unpaid. ~ Henry Ford

It was usual to be obedient to authority, to obey a legal letter. But Rachaela left her bills
unpaid until the threats began. She ignored the money-envelopes stuck through the door for starving
children and the sick. ~ Tanith Lee

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twenty-somethings feeling naïve, even devastated.Twenty-somethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas, making it more difficult for twenty-somethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twenty-somethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twenty-somethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation. ~ Meg Jay

Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his mother's womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before): once delivered he stands steady in a camel's hair loincloth at a ford in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure. And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and the body left on earth, the one which was to rule the twelve tribes of Israel, and on earth, left crying out - My God, why dost thou shame me? Hopelessly ascendent in resurrection, the image is pegged on the wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold, triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the truth ~ William Gaddis

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid
labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved. ~ Silvia Federici

O, this life Is nobler than attending for a check, Richer than doing nothing for a robe, Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk: Such pain the cap of him that makes him fine Yet keeps his book uncrossed. ~ William Shakespeare

Anticipated rents, and bills unpaid,
Force many a shining youth into the shade,
Not to redeem his time, but his estate,
And play the fool, but at the cheaper rate. ~ William Cowper

The Pashtun tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian Every large house is a real feudal fortress ... Eve ry family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud ... Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid. ~ Winston Churchill

It's not the best between my family and me. There are so many crimes left unpunished, debts unpaid, white elephants in the middle of the room that no one will even offer a peanut to. We are in the red, emotionally speaking. ~ Margaret Cho

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation. ~ Herbert Hoover

This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing. ~ Karl Marx

The job description of mother is clearly in need of revision. As it stands, the shifts are 24 hours, for a period of approximately 1,825 consecutive days. The benefits are sorely in need of amendment: no vacations, no sick leave, no lunch hours, no breaks. Moreover, it is the only unpaid position I know of that can result in arrest if you fail to show up for work. ~ Mary Blakely

What all women have in common is that they share most of the unpaid work of the world. ~ Hilda Scott

The real reason for withholding taxes is the unwillingness of workers to share their incomes with the government and the consequent difficulties of collection. To overcome this handicap, the government has simply impressed employers into its service as involuntary and unpaid tax collectors. It is a form of conscription. Disregarding the right of privacy, which is an essential of liberty, the government's agents may, under the law, invade the employer's office, demand his accounts, and punish him for any infraction which they believe he has committed; they can impound his property and inflict a penalty for not having collected taxes for the government. ~ Frank Chodorov

A wolf is clever-clever-clever, and they are as faithful as a debt unpaid. ~ Tad Williams

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us. ~ Barry Commoner

Accounting for the unpaid care economy can drive progressive policies such as paid family leave, social security credits for early childcare, tax credits, and quality early childhood education. ~ Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Being first lady is the hardest unpaid job in the world. ~ Pat Nixon

And Schyogolev launched on a discussion of politics. Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon following which a logical and sober mind (in this case his mind) could with no effort explain and foresee a multitude of world events. The names of countries and of their leading representatives became in his hands something in the nature of labels for more or less full but essentially identical vessels, whose contents he poured this way and that. France was AFRAID of something or other and therefore would never allow it. England was AIMING at something. This statesman CRAVED a rapprochement, while that one wanted to increase his PRESTIGE. Someone was PLOTTING and someone was STRIVING for something. In short, the world Schyogolev created came out as some kind of collection of limited, humorless, faceless and abstract bullies, and the more brains, cunning and circumspection he found in their mutual activities the more stupid, vulgar and simple his world became. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Men are not only women's unpaid bodyguards, they actually pay to be a woman's bodyguard. ~ Warren Farrell

Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid. ~ Kathy Skaggs

I throw away stacks of newspaper and catalogs, bills that probably went unpaid for years, plastic bags of hangers and wires, and the hockey stick. ~ Holly Black

Seems to be catching."
"What is?" asked Neku.
"Wanting Kit dead."
Neku shrugged. "He was fucking the wife of a gang boss and bikers used his bar to deal drugs, plus lots of uyoku felt Yoshi Tanaka should be married to someone Japanese. Then there's chippu he owed to the local police and unpaid bills from a Brazilian transvestite who mends his motorcycle. It could have been anyone. ~ Jon Courtenay Grimwood

I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields; Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. You with the unpaid bill, Despair, You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, I will pay you in the grave, Death will listen to your stave. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers. ~ Ali Liebegott

Every labourer is worthy of his hire. No country can produce thousands of unpaid whole-time workers. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

According to the California Hospital Association, health care for illegal aliens is costing state taxpayers well over $1 billion a year. Eighty-four hospitals across California have already been forced to close because of unpaid bills by illegal aliens. ~ Ann Coulter

It doesn't matter. We could never date anyway. Doesn't the FBI have rules against partners dating? Even if I am just an unpaid consultant.'
'I'd certainly never want to date Gerard, so I never asked. ~ Rosemary Clement-Moore

Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good. ~ Laurie Penny

Worrying is a full-time job -- I wish it paid better! ~ Joseph Ohler Jr.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local YMCA, then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at 'The Mountain View Voice,' my hometown newspaper. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

We [women] are the majority of the population, majority of the electorate, majority of the workforce ... and yet we're still doing majority of family unpaid or low paid labor. And we live longer. Our stuff is not "special interest" stuff. Our stuff is the stuff of the future, of the whole. ~ Ai-jen Poo

Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure
chemically pure, I mean, ... not morally. ~ Aldous Huxley

Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology. ~ Christian De Duve

No debt goes unpaid in the universe. ~ Deepak Chopra

GDP doesn't register, as Robert Kennedy put it, "the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate." GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, "except that which makes life worthwhile." Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy. ~ Eric Weiner

Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor. ~ Toni Morrison

The laboring people should unite and should protect themselves against all idlers. You can divide mankind into two classes: the laborers and the idlers, the supporters and the supported, the honest and the dishonest. Every man is dishonest who lives upon the unpaid labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. All laborers should be brothers. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres.

But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of ~ Rebecca Traister

My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven't done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done. My uncalled parents, unpaid credit cards, unwashed dishes, and unshaved legs pale in comparison to the noble breakthrough under pursuit. My lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am. ~ Hope Jahren

Choice: that was the thing. Other people claimed that you can't choose who you love
it just happens!
but Grace and Roman knew that was a bunch of happy horseshit. Of course you chose who you loved. If you didn't choose, you ended up with what was left
the drunks and abusers, the debtors and vacuums, the ones who ate their food too fast or had never read a novel. Damn, marriage was hard work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. Yet, year after year, Grace and Roman had pressed their shoulders against the stone and rolled it up the hill together. ~ Sherman Alexie

Rachel gestured toward the city beyond the alley. "The people out there? Humans who spend every day under the Demons' heels? They've given their share. They've made up for the blood of my kin with their sweat and their agony. Their debt is paid.
"But you," she pointed a damning finger down at him. "You have given nothing. You've shed no blood, and you've suffered no pain. Your debt is unpaid, Hammon. I am here for compensation. ~ S.G. Night

Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence - the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes - all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. ~ Jon Krakauer

When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven't unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks. ~ George R R Martin

A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property - an unpaid tax bill. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

Can't believe you're making me say this am willing to fill any role required by you i.e. buddy best buddy laborer unpaid driver unpaid gardener unpaid father of your children coat etc just tell me which and how we'll manage come home will square things with your Pa - Charlie ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs or 'death professions. ~ Warren Farrell

Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you ~ Jack London

I regarded homework as a form of torture that the teachers would unleash on me. ~ Steven Magee

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,
and the trail has its own stern code. ~ Robert W. Service

I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament. I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year. I hear scornful dismissal of concerns about global warming, an issue viewed seriously by the vast majority of scientists. I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it. ~ Philip Yancey

Women are always expected to be the gracious hostess, quick with an anecdote and a sprinkling of laughter at others' stories. We are always the ones who have to smooth over all the awkward moments in life with soul-crushing pleasantries. We are basically unpaid geishas. But when we do not fulfill this expectation ( because we are introverted ) people asume we must be either depressed or a cunt". ~ Amy Schumer

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office. ~ Gloria Steinem

A promise made is a debt unpaid ~ Robert W. Service

problems, your challenges, your obstacles, your goals, and your ideas in writing. Make small lists such as a: To-do list. Everything you need to do, big and small. To-call list. Everyone you need to call, major and minor. To-get over list. Baggage in your life, empty and full. To-resolve list. Things that need decision or resolution. To-pay list. All matters of money you think about, paid and unpaid. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer

Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work. ~ Nancy Chodorow

Stress is your body's way of saying you haven't worked enough unpaid overtime. ~ Scott Adams

The fact is that a lot of the spending increases came during the Bush administration. Two unpaid for wars we got ourselves engaged in. A prescription drug plan that added enormous amounts to our spending, and the tax cuts at the high end that did not create jobs and create revenue coming. ~ Nancy Pelosi

I've heard from lots of organizers in the [Bernie] Sanders campaign, both paid and unpaid. I have heard from lots of them. We have not heard from the Sanders campaign. I do not expect to hear from the Sanders campaign. But you know, it's not over until it's over. So we remain open to that possibility. As Bernie said himself, it's not about a man, it's a movement. ~ Jill Stein

We have all seen examples of God's most wonderful creature, the person, who is inspired to go beyond the mechanical requirements of a task. Such men and women, paid or unpaid, express the spirit of the volunteer - literally the will to make a product better, a school the very best, a clinic more compassionate and effective. Their spirit, generating new ideas, resisting discouragement, and demanding results, animates the heart of every effective society."

- His Highness the Aga Khan, Enabling Environment Conference, Nairobi, October 20, 1986. ~ Aga Khan

It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework.

The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since. ~ Stephanie Coontz

The politics of time was clarified in my women's liberation group in the 1970's when one of us, a mother of small children, found herself single. Parenting and providing seemed irreconcilable. Within a generation it had become the norm. By 2010 single parents comprised 25 per cent of all families and 60 per cent had a paid job. The agenda this implies is obvious: not the trick of work-life balance that assigns responsibility to women but a political economy that has at its heart not a breadwinner who is an unencumbered, cared-for man but a mother.

Women's appeal to men to share parenting has, of course, been answered by millions of men. They attend the birth of their babies, they fall in love with them and then soon, too soon, before they have even got acquainted, they leave the babies and the mother's from morning till night and go back to their paid jobs. Nowhere have men reciprocated women's paid work and unpaid care by initiating mass movements for men's equal parental leave or working time that synchronizes with children and women; nowhere have men en masse shared the costs - in time and money - of childhood. ~ Beatrix Campbell

something's knocking at the door

a great white light dawns across the
continent
as we fawn over our failed traditions,
often kill to preserve them
or sometimes kill just to kill.
it doesn't seem to matter: the answers dangle just
out of reach,
out of hand, out of mind.


the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like a prayer for unmerited grace.


it all looks more and more like the same old movie.
the actors are different but the plot's the same:
senseless.


we should have known, watching our fathers.
we should have known, watching our mothers.
they did not know, they too were not prepared to teach.
we were too naive to ignore their counsel and now we have embraced their ignorance as our own.
we are them, multiplied.
we are their unpaid debts.
we are bankrupt in money and in spirit.


there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the
edge
and will
at any moment
tumble down to join the rest
of us,
the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly
corrupt.


a great white light dawns across the
continent,
the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,
Charles Bukowski

I'm about to haul my packs into a tree to make camp when a silver parachute floats down and lands in front of me. A gift form a sponsor. But why now? I've been in fairly good shape with supplies. Maybe Haymitch's noticed my despondency and is trying to cheer me up a bit. Or could it be something to help my ear?

I open the parachute and find a small loaf of bread. It's not the fine white of the Capitol stuff. It's made of dark ration grain and shaped in a crescent. Sprinkled with seeds. I flashback to Peeta's lesson on the various district breads in the Training Center. This bread came from District 11. I cautiously lift the still warm loaf. What must it have cost the people of District 11 who can't even feed themselves? How many would've had to do without to scrape up a coin to put in the collection for this one loaf? It had been meant for Rue, surely. But instead of pulling the gift when she died, they'd authorized Haymitch to give it to me. As a thank-you? Or because, like me, they don't like to let debts go unpaid? For whatever reason, this is a first. A district gift to a tribute who's not your own.

I lift my face and step into the last falling rays of sunlight. "My thanks to the people of District Eleven," I say. I want them to know I know where it came from. That the full value of the gift has been recognized. ~ Suzanne Collins

The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. ~ Germaine Greer

Nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day. ~ Gerda Lerner

My final word, before I'm done, Is "Cancer can be rather fun"- Provided one confronts the tumour with a sufficient sense of humour. I know that cancer often kills, But so do cars and sleeping pills; And it can hurt till one sweats, So can bad teeth and unpaid debts. A spot of laughter, I am sure, Often accelerates one's cure; So let us patients do our bit To help the surgeons make us fit. ~ John B. S. Haldane

Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments. ~ David McCandless

It is better to do what you love for work, but if it is your day job that enables an unpaid passion, then your life is still sweeter. What is important is that you make time for your dreams, not whether or not you get paid for it. ~ Tara Moss

A poet is an unpaid laborer of a mine where he digs into the mountain to find rough diamonds. He then polishes them with his imagination and emotion to share with everyone. ~ Debasish Mridha

Doctor(to patient): Give me your parent's number so that we can tell them what a bad boy you have been.

Patient(Confused, unwilling): You don't need to.

Doctor:Hospital Rules!!! And no matter how much i hate dead people, I hate Unpaid bills more ~ Durjoy Datta

He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to. ~ Ian McEwan

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation. ~ Douglas Rushkoff