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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ff6b4f0 | Happiness is harder to put into words. It's also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I've begged them to leave. | David Sedaris | ||
| ed8c649 | We're not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you're more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award. | David Sedaris | ||
| dbbc8be | A young couple strolls by, the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other. | David Sedaris | ||
| dde41dd | I had just turned twenty-nine, and honestly, I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometimes it felt like life was more a process of elimination than a series of choices. | David Sedaris | ||
| 432f445 | Shopping has nothing to do with money. If you have it, you go to stores and galleries, and if not, you haunt flea markets or Goodwills. Never, though, do you not do it, choosing instead to visit a park or a temple or some cultural institution where they don't sell things. | David Sedaris | ||
| a6be2db | That's the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it. | David Sedaris | ||
| 56fde18 | When I saw myself through my parents' eyes, I saw a worm crawling through mud and shit toward a psychedelic mushroom, but when I saw myself through hers, I felt that things were possibly not as bad as they seemed. | David Sedaris | ||
| be048cb | Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next. | Erik Larson | ||
| 8544079 | constantly keep in mind that whatever has happened | Erik Larson | ||
| e5b33b1 | With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come | Erik Larson | ||
| 2eacc9d | In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. --DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy: Canto I (Carlyle-Wicksteed Translation, 1932) | Erik Larson | ||
| c44fa8f | he bought his farm. The grueling work that had so worn on him during his boyhood now became for him both a soul-saving diversion and a romantic harking back to America's past. | Erik Larson | ||
| 7a8e4b8 | German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty "provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors." The time had come, he proclaimed, "to silence doctrinaire fanatics." -- | Erik Larson | ||
| 8d21ba5 | camp: "If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage." Goebbels acted immediately" | Erik Larson | ||
| 9830f14 | U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers. | Erik Larson | ||
| 2343172 | throughout America, who | Erik Larson | ||
| cacd96d | When the conversation turned to Germany's persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could "to ameliorate Jewish sufferings" but added a caveat: "the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time." In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany's Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd" | Erik Larson | ||
| 0f9ba1d | There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler's government could not possible endure. Germany's military power was limited... And Hitler himself had begun to seem like a more temperate actor than might have been predicted given the violence that had swept Germany earlier in the year. On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party burned unwelcome books -- Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others -- in great pyres throughout Ger.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 953d051 | strict economy in the use of natural resources has not been practiced, but it must be henceforth unless we are immoral enough to impair conditions in which our children are to live."25" | Erik Larson | ||
| b5f6e0e | Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously," wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. "Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities." Although" | Erik Larson | ||
| 7bbca50 | The article called Dodd a "small, dry, nervous, pedantic man ... whose appearance at diplomatic and social functions inevitably called forth yawning boredom." | Erik Larson | ||
| b5e92c4 | There would be miracles at the fair--the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000-pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold-- | Erik Larson | ||
| c18ec22 | He died in his bed at his farm on February 9, 1940, at 3:10 p.m., with Martha and Bill Jr. at his side, his life work--his Old South--anything but finished. | Erik Larson | ||
| 97f1a70 | At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he published an article in the Nation in which he attacked a successful campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that held that the South "was altogether right in seceding from the Union." | Erik Larson | ||
| d4abf21 | He praised Hitler as "the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity they now enjoyed." He particularly admired the Nazi "Strength through Joy" program, which provided all German workers with no-expense vacations and other entertainments. Wilson saw it as a powerful tool for helping Germany resist communist inroads and suppressing workers' demands for higher wages--money that.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 8afc307 | I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time." Bloom" | Erik Larson | ||
| 0ab19bd | among the population of Americans who expressed anti-Semitic leanings, a common jibe described the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt as the "Rosenberg administration." | Erik Larson | ||
| dee48da | On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: "And I have loved Germany so." | Erik Larson | ||
| 4500046 | The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, "The election here is a farce." Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners--96 percent--voted in favor of Hitler's government. On" | Erik Larson | ||
| e9462b5 | He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler | Erik Larson | ||
| 48c949b | Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens. Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In | Erik Larson | ||
| 4f0d631 | MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The | Erik Larson | ||
| 6a2182b | Coordination" occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or "self-coordination." Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if t.. | Erik Larson | ||
| b264de5 | One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans | Erik Larson | ||
| 467e750 | Elsewhere in the government, Dodd thought he detected a new and decidedly moderate bent, at least by comparison to Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels, whom he described as "adolescents in the great game of international leadership." It was in the next tier down, the ministries, that he found cause for hope." | Erik Larson | ||
| 61b6f6e | I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me. | Erik Larson | ||
| ce5c67f | Neurath saw himself as a sobering force in the government and believed he could help control Hitler and his party. As one peer put it, "He was trying to train the Nazis and turn them into really serviceable partners in a moderate nationalist regime." But Neurath also thought it likely that Hitler's government eventually would do itself in. "He always believed," one of his aides wrote, "that if he would only stay in office, do his duty, and .. | Erik Larson | ||
| 2bd01f5 | In his dispatches Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany. "The Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and their time so taken up by pleasant entertainment, that they will have little opportunity to learn what the real situation is." | Erik Larson | ||
| 54d9c37 | The next day Phipps wrote about Goring's open house in his diary. "The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality," he wrote, but the episode had provided him a valuable if unsettling insight into the nature of Nazi rule. "The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naivete of General Goring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting.. | Erik Larson | ||
| be34eee | He added: "With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere." | Erik Larson | ||
| f476946 | Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably," he wrote. "There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate." | Erik Larson | ||
| d1a64ec | Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States "did not have a Jewish problem" of its own. "You know, of course," Dodd said, "that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life." He added that some of his peers in Washington had told him confidentially that "they appreciated the difficulties of the Germans in this respect but that t.. | Erik Larson | ||
| b11a1b3 | Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term "fanatical" became a positive trait. Suddenly" | Erik Larson | ||
| 2c1ee80 | Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will "sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales." | Erik Larson |