In the beginning, Adam was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow – not Eve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s place is in the home!
Conventional
For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, ‘Flannery’ will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill – for decades.
The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with ‘Ulysses,’ but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Isn’t that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.