Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

American society is a sort of flat fresh-water pond which absorbs silently without reaction anything which is thrown into it.