Permanent Status Negotiations

Famous quotes containing the words permanent, status and/or negotiations:

    I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not really become aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly are—knowing because I am one of them—I am still amazed at how one need only say “I work” to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. “I work” has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.
    Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)

    But always and sometimes questioning the old modes
    And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,
    Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual
    Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,
    Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)