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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 960f801 | The barn was dark from the storm, and we couldn't find the harness, which no one had used in years. Old Jake, who had sprained his good foot falling off a horse and was hobbling around worse than ever, started getting panicky at the idea of the dam giving out and washing away the cattle, but I told him to hush his mouth. We all knew what was at stake, and if we were going to save the ranch, we needed clear heads. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 5304a7a | Dad said High Lonesome, as the area was known, wasn't a place for the soft of head or the weak of heart, and he said that was why he and I made out just fine there, because we were both tough nuts. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 391d138 | aficionados of the weather. We'd follow a storm | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 4aed17c | As for the learning itself, I figured you didn't need a college degree to become on of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| bab17fb | There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it. The soil belonged to you, and so did every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, and all the water and minerals under the land all the way to the center of the earth. And if the world went to hell in a hand-basket--as it seemed to be doing--you could .. | property | Jeannette Walls | |
| 5c3bc10 | Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. "Well, there you go", she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. "If you don't think you're hurt, then you aren't", she said. "So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you're stronger then that", she went back to her crossword puzzle." | mysogyny | Jeannette Walls | |
| bff7123 | WHEN PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 1e473e6 | I've told you before, life's not about doing what you want. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 6d98d30 | we should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| e1a4c01 | woman grabbed my shirt and tried to pull me over the chain. "It's all right," I told her. "My dad does stuff like this all the time." "He should be arrested!" she shouted. "Okay, kids," | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 88b6e26 | Most important thing in life," he would say, "is learning how to fall." *" | Jeannette Walls | ||
| b8339d2 | A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| 1e6e565 | Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do. | family-relationships growing-up parenting | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 8ff08b9 | So the Bible is not so sad in the end?' 'Yes, it is the saddest book in the world. We are asked to believe that God has played an infantile trick on us: he has made himself unobservable, as an eternal test of "faith". What I read, though, is the story of a species cursed by gifts and delusions that it cannot understand. I read of exile, abandonment and the terrible grief of beings who have lost something real - not of a people being put to .. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| fc8f338 | I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say {he} had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by some bewigged ancestor awash with loot from the War of the Spanish Succession or some such lucrative away fixture. | humor luxury | Sebastian Faulks | |
| e466615 | And when I die all the memories of my own life will go to the grave with me, God willing, and Dick will never have to look back at them. And his children will never even know what my life was like. They'll know nothing of grinding stones and lying down to sleep in what felt like a coffin and being hungry and ashamed all day and night and being beaten by a teacher who couldn't write himself and being sure you kept your mind so empty that you.. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 420c351 | But it was only the twentieth century in Europe that had universal education and the belief in progress - a net gain of knowledge among all. And that's now been abandoned as a goal." "Why?" "It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. T.. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 1994906 | What is the most real thing you can think of?"] Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, 'Memory'." | memory nostalgia | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 2d8316c | I liked slicing through the beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down over your wrists, and picture the billion firing synapse that for many years had made the cauliflower believe that it was Fred. | Sebastian Faulks | ||
| 50e6dab | It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spending out of control. | civic-duty community liberalism | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 64a64da | In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months. | accumulated-knowledge | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 443f4dc | They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown. | history perspective stress | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 9613336 | Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved. | influence maturation rebellion submission | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| bb70b5f | A woman's life has so many demands because she is the axis around which so many little planets spin. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| 43fda60 | John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinching evidence that his position was principled, because it was obvious that he was not courting popular opinion. His alienation, therefore, was a measure of his integrity. | political-theater popularity | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| ad1ffbf | If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity - perhaps the ultimate form of control. | journalism perspective writing | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 0ab5381 | I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such Circumstances, I should have taken my musket upon my Shoulder & entered the Ranks or ... had retir'd to the back country & lived in a Wig-wam. --GEORGE WASHINGTON | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| ebd17a2 | eager to oppose Thomas Paine's prescription in Common Sense for a huge single-house legislature that purportedly embodied the will of "the people" in its purest form. For Adams, "the people" was a more complicated, multivoiced, hydra-headed thing that had to be enclosed within different chambers." | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 7f2a5e9 | the land of opportunity, where credentials mattered less than demonstrated ability. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| ae650a5 | Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was "the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies ... the key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada, to the Great Lakes, and to all the Indian Nations." | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| c443c5f | Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a "standing army" struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous .. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| c645c7f | But the question made no sense to the bulk of the troops, who regarded instinctive obedience to orders and ready acceptance of subordination within a military hierarchy as infringements on the very liberty they were fighting for. They saw themselves as invincible, not because they were disciplined soldiers like the redcoats but because they were patriotic, liberty-loving men willing to risk their lives for their convictions. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| e81fb68 | William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the acknowledged architect of the British victory in the French and Indian War, rose to condemn the decision to militarize the conflict. He recommended the withdrawal from Boston of all British troops, who could only serve as incendiaries for a provocative incident that triggered a war. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 9b3609e | Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 9f1fc7c | Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| f32bfbd | Moreover, the very belief that Americans had somehow discovered the ultimate answer to mankind's eternal quandaries and were now poised to establish heaven on earth was a delusion that deserved to be ranked alongside the fables about the Holy Grail and the fountain of youth. "We may boast that we are one, the chosen people,: he (Adams) warned, " and we may even thank God that we are not like other men, but, after all, it would be but flatte.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 6ee61b1 | Having now finished the work assigned me," Washington solemnly said, "I retire from the great theatre of Action....I here offer my Commission, and take leave of all the enjoyments of public life." The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greates.. | retirement | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 3708f19 | The great sin of the originalists is not to harbor a political agenda but to claim they do not, and to base that claim on a level of historical understanding they demonstrably do not possess. | supreme-court us-constitution | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 5a2fdc6 | One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers. | discipline habit internalization professionalism | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 1071aa6 | The first is the political tale of how thirteen colonies came together and agreed on the decision to secede from the British Empire. Here the center point is the Continental Congress, and the leading players, at least in my version, are John Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| fea5126 | The second is the military narrative of the battles on Long Island and Manhattan, where the British army and navy delivered a series of devastating defeats to an American army of amateurs, but missed whatever chance existed to end it all. The focal point of this story is the Continental Army, and the major actors are George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and the British brothers Richard and William Howe. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| 7db0a36 | Hugh had been her obsession. When he was away, she had assumed he was with other women. It drove her crazy, dominated her thoughts. She had tried to concentrate on her daughters, but her own insecurity was much too huge. When Skye would beg for a story or Clea would need help with her music lessons, Augusta would tell them to ask Caroline. So Augusta could be with Hugh. | Luanne Rice | ||
| ec16c5a | p. 274 ...his trademark decision to surrender power as commander in chief and then president, was not...a sign that he had conquered his ambitions, but rather that he fully realized that all ambitions were inherently insatiable and unconquerable. He knew himself well enough to resist the illusion that he transcended human nature. Unlike Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell before him, and Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao after him, he understood that .. | reputation retirement | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 03cbca9 | For example, the Continental Congress made a deliberate decision to avoid any consideration of the slavery question, even though most delegates were fully aware that it violated the principles they claimed to be fighting for. Adams is most revealing on this score because, more than anyone else, he articulated the need to defer the full promise of the American Revolution in order to assure a robust consensus on the independence question. | Joseph J. Ellis |