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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4929dc5 | Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?" "The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back" | Joy Kogawa | ||
| b9c0806 | Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky. | Joy Kogawa | ||
| fe09769 | I hate to admit it," she said, "but for all we hear about the States, Canada's capacity for racism seems even worse." "Worse?" "The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn't liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren't allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We've never recov.. | Joy Kogawa | ||
| c21030f | we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant"." | Joy Kogawa | ||
| 9bf400b | I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4402818 | There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4996ab5 | At a swearing-in ceremony for new immigrants in the summer of 2014, the Harvard-educated First Lady Michelle Obama said: "It's amazing that just a few feet from here where I'm standing are the signatures of the fifty-six Founders who put their names on a Declaration that changed the course of history. And like the fifty of you, none of them were born American--they became American." That's if you don't count the forty-eight of fifty-six who.. | Ann Coulter | ||
| a2c4aa3 | This anti-Hillary sentiment was especially alive and well in the White House, where the ruling triumvirs--Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Michelle Obama--were working overtime to undermine Hillary's chances. | Edward Klein | ||
| 08db53d | At a swearing-in ceremony for new immigrants in the summer of 2014, the Harvard-educated First Lady Michelle Obama said: "It's amazing that just a few feet from here where I'm standing are the signatures of the fifty-six Founders who put their names on a Declaration that changed the course of history. And like the fifty of you, none of them were born American--they became American." That's if you don't count the forty-eight of fifty-six who.. | Ann Coulter | ||
| b958041 | Even if we didn't know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. | Michelle Obama | ||
| 9ee03a6 | The twenty-first-century successful black woman is brilliant and tenacious and not afraid to flex her intellectual, spiritual, or financial muscles. She has accomplished, earned, and owned more than black women of any other generation in American history. | Sophia Nelson | ||
| 4346e22 | The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know. | Michelle Obama | ||
| 6c48e96 | Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. | Michelle Obama | ||
| 9d96fec | They kept in touch for years and years. Momma believed in the goodness of people and she believed in the prayer of protection, that wherever she was, God was, too. Mom had a way of taking people under her wing and making you feel special when you were talking to her. Your story mattered. And whenever she thought I was getting a little too full of myself, she'd remind me: "Robin, your story is no more important than anybody else's story. Whe.. | Robin Roberts | ||
| 33a9b63 | also wanted to make sure that when I visited a new place as First Lady, I really visited it--meaning that I'd have a chance to meet the people who actually lived there, not just those who governed them. Traveling abroad, I had opportunities that Barack didn't. | Michelle Obama | ||
| 1a8bc69 | This would be the only time in eight years that he'd request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of dim comfort. Usually, work was work and home was home, but for us, as for many people, the tragedy in Newtown shattered every window and blew down every fence. When I walked into the Oval Office, Barack and I embraced silently. There was nothing to say. No words. | Michelle Obama | ||
| f1a44c6 | Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts ... good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don't hurt. They're not painful. That's not just with somebody you want to marry, but it's with the friends that you choose. It's with the people you surround yourselves with." ~ Michelle Obama" | Lasana Smith | ||
| ce56318 | In those days I would come out of the house, turn onto Flatbush Avenue, and my face would tighten like a Mexican wrestler's mask, my eyes would dart from corner to corner, my arms loose, limber, and ready. This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to prot.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a020623 | Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time. | one-at-a-time pragmatism revolution think-global-act-local | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 02efbd5 | In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility. | criminal | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 298dd27 | Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different--often very different--ways of shaping particular letters. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 96ba07b | The fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the Northern colonies from the blood spilled in the Revolutionary War, any more than you can discon.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 27ae293 | ultimate in respectability: not only received back into the ranks of the people but also | Nien Cheng | ||
| 925adb5 | The leader of the Red Guards stepped up to Nien Cheng. "We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!" Nien Cheng held up the copy of the Constitution and looked the leader in the eye. "It's against the Constitution to enter a private house without a search warrant." The man grabbed the Constitution out of Nien's hand and threw it on the floor. "The Constitution is abolished. It was a document written by the .. | Charles W. Colson | ||
| a81c65a | Mr. Hu said:] There always comes a time when a man almost reaches the end of his endurance and is tempted to write down something, however untrue, to satisfy his inquisitors and to free himself from intolerable pressure. But one mustn't do it. [. . .] Once one starts confessing, they will demand more and more admissions of guilt, however false, and exert increasing pressure to get what they want. In the end, one will get into a tangle of un.. | Nien Cheng | ||
| 36ea54c | The poet Tao Yuan-ming (A.D. 376 - 427) used the lotus to represent a man of honor in a famous poem, saying that the lotus rose out of mud but remained unstained. [. . .] Perhaps the poet was too idealistic, I thought as I listened to the laughter of the Red Guards overhead. They seemed to be blissfully happy in their work of destruction because they were sure they were doing something to satisfy their God, Mao Zedong. | Nien Cheng | ||
| ce4dac6 | I love China! I love my country even though it is not always good ro right,' my daughter proclaimed in a firm voice. Her words brought tears to my eyes. I also had a deep and abiding love for the land of my ancestors even though, because of my class status, I had become an outcast. | Nien Cheng | ||
| 9f531bf | I must not only keep alive, but I must be as strong as granite, so that no matter how much I was knocked about, I could remain unbroken. | Nien Cheng | ||
| 4ec9447 | Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 12567c0 | The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant. | Peter Hessler | ||
| ad6acc3 | Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 7bb11b3 | Rasha had been employed by two different Chinese shops, and she said that after this experience she would never work for an Egyptian. She described the Chinese as direct and honest, and she appreciated their distance from local gossip networks. "They keep their secrets," she said." | Peter Hessler | ||
| e7635ae | In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 1057233 | I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 34c0073 | Akhenaten's kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display. | Peter Hessler | ||
| 4ee82ca | Some slogans of modern political revolutionaries--" Make America Great Again"--echo the way that Akhenaten and other pharaohs manipulated nostalgia in order to justify change." | Peter Hessler | ||
| cd607aa | All the women who worked in the shops were unmarried, and invariably they were fascinated by the relationships of their foreign bosses. "They're equal," Rasha, the assistant at the Chinese Lingerie Corner, said about the couple whom she worked for. "And they discuss things. They have arguments, but they talk about it. Egyptians just try to dominate." | Peter Hessler | ||
| f70ec22 | One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off' to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and wa.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a33718b | They were all women's magazines, but they weren't like the magazines my mother and sister read. The articles in my mother's and sister's magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like "Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms," "Office Sex--How to Get It," "Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex," and "Those Shrinking Rain Forests--Are They Any Good for Sex?" The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c5c2da4 | In 1935, not far from where we stood now, some fishermen captured a fourteen-foot beige shark and took it to a public aquarium at Coogee, where it was put on display. The shark swam around for a day or two in its new home, then abruptly, and to the certain surprise of the viewing public, regurgitated a human arm. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 942f7fe | I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing - by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged background so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6846466 | It is so difficult to be honest when someone has died; it's as if truth stops at the grave even when the lies continue to hurt the living. | Celeste De Blasis | ||
| 9bc854d | The air was cool and shadowed in the great oak. Alex took a deep breath, trying to taste its greenness. It did have a taste, an elusive sweetness. Eyes half-closed, legs dangling, she felt the solid trunk against her back, the pull of the earth on her legs. Despite her presence, birds flew in and out of the tree, and her mind went with them, seeking the course of their secret journeys. She was on the edge of knowing how it felt to be one of.. | Celeste De Blasis | ||
| 4918f65 | It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a 50-ton stone 18 miles across the countryside, muscle it into an upright position and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the p.. | Bill Bryson |