""What is a sentence. A sentence is left to be alright and therefor (sic) they are barely here.
A day is additional with there having been with a condition of remaining all day which it is partly that they like to look about made it for them in reference as they knew that is whenever they met by the arrangement which had been made for them in the mean time. What is a sentence. They need not be having them made by them.
in 'Sentences' chapter, p. 175 my edition, How to Write." "
— Gertrude Stein

"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"We must have public officials who will stand up and tell the people exactly what they think... Our failure in recent years has not been the failure of the people to meet the challenges placed before them, but rather the failure of both our great political parties to place those challenges honestly and courageously before the people, and to trust the willingness of the people to do the things that really need to be done."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"We all know - or at least we are told continuously - that we are a divided people. And we know there's a degree of truth in it. We have too often allowed our differences to prevail among us. We have too often allowed ambitious men to play off those differences for political gain. We have too often retreated behind our differences when no one really tried to lead us beyond them."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"But all our differences hardly measure up to the values we all hold in common... "
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down. "
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"The senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it's a pretty good detour.
Hubert Humphrey, as quoted by Biden, p. 134"
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"614246
"... in an airport in '64, Goldwater said, 'Well, keep punching, Hubert' during a chance meeting there.
By the end of 1977, it became increasingly clear that the Boss (Hubert Humphrey) would not be around much longer. And on the Senate floor one day, Barry Goldwater walked across the aisle and enveloped Hubert Humphrey. Goldwater was so big and Humphrey so frail that Humphrey almost disappeared. The two men stood for a long moment, locked in a hug, and I could see that both men were crying. They made no effort to hide it."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics) "
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"614246
".. you should not run for president because tactically you can win. The questions you have to ask are why you're running for president and what will you do when you are president. You shouldn't run until you know the answers to those questions."
-John Marttila"
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"the Democratic Party had failed (in 1983)
'to remember waht got us this far and how we got here -- moral indignation, decent instincts, a sense of shared sacrifice and mutual responsibility, and a set of national priorities that emphasized what we had in common.. The Party that was the engine of the national interest -- molding our pluralistic interest into a compelling new social contract that served the nation well for fifty years -- became perceived as little more than the broker of narrow special interests. Instead of thinking of ourselves as Americans first, Democrats second, and members of interest groups third, we have begun to think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.. We have let our opponents set the agenda and define what is at stake.
p. 140"
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"1983:
To my generation has now come the challenge. In the days to come we will be tested on whether we have the moral courage, the realism, the idealism, the tenacity, and the ability to sacrifice some of the current comfort to invest in the future... I believe that this generation will rise to the challenge... The experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less than forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"..she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. "
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see. "
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"The conservatives could sneer about "social engineering" if they wanted, but I thought that most people believed as I did that government should embody our best hopes and lend a hand to people who were struggling."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"quoting from Neil Kinnock, running against Thatcher in 1987:
Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Is it because all our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite, and write poetry, those people who could make wonderful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Those women who could survive eleven childbearings? Were they weak? Anybody really think that they didn't get what we have because they didn't have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform on which they could stand."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"America is the promised land, because each generation bequeathed to its children a promise, a promise that they might not come to enjoy but which they fully expected their offspring to fulfill. So the words 'all men are created equal' took a life of its own, ultimately destined to end slavery and enfranchise women. And the words 'equal protection' and 'due process' inevitably led to the end of the words 'separate but equal,' ensuring that the walls of segregation would crumble, whether at the lunch counter or at the voting booth."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"I believe all Americans are born with certain inalienable rights. As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not denied by any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator, and they represent the essence of human dignity..."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"Robert Bork, at opening of Judiciary hearings:
How should a judge go about finding the law? The only legitimate way, in my opinion, is by attempting to discern what those who made the law intended...
As I wrote in an opinion for our court, the judge's responsibility "is to discern how the framers' values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply in the world we know.
If a judge abandons intentions as his guide, there is no law available to him, and he begins to legislate a social agenda for the American people. That goes well beyond his powers.."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"My own father had always said the measure of a man wasn't how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up. I made a pledge to myself that I would get up and emerge from this debacle better for having gone through it. I would live up to the expectation I had for myself. I would be the kind of man I wanted to be."
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

""Acknowledging that a woman's right to be safe from a gender-based attack was a "civil right," I believed, was critically important in changing the American consciousness. When a right reaches the status and categorization of a "civil right," it means the nation has arrived at a consensus that is nonnegotiable. Violence against women would no longer be written off ... Once our criminal justice system -- at the local, state and federal levels -- recognized these as serious and inexcusable crimes, women could stop blaming themselves.""
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"Senator John Stennis:
'The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. ... It freed my soul.'"
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

""[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.""
— Geraldine Brooks

"It was the meanest moment of eternity."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

""The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel. ""
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west -- that cloud field of the sky -- to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"You'se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn."
— Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father)

"My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.
At least that's what I would choose to believe."
— Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father)

"Winter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome -- black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds"
— Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father)

"That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories. "
— Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father)

"'How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.'
'Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile.
'We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us.'"
— Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father)

"Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality."
— Richard Wright (Native Son)

"Men can starve from a lack of self realization as much as they can from a lack of bread."
— Richard Wright

"I tried.
Can't do it.
Brain's empty."
— Sharon Creech (Love That Dog)

"Sometimes
when you are trying
not to think about something
it keeps popping back in your head
you can't help it
you think about it
and
think about it
and
think about it
until your brain
feels like
a squashed pea."
— Sharon Creech (Love That Dog)

"The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"When Catherine told me about this (tragedy nearby), I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace."
She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this _is_ grace."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands. "
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship--a play between diving grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measurable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he's a little bit of both. We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses -- one foot is on the horse called 'fate,' the other on the horse called 'free will.' And the question you have to ask every day is-- which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to sterr with concentrated effort?"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment."
— Carl Sandburg

"There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love."
— Marge Piercy

""i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people""
— Marge Piercy