Alicia > Alicia's Quotes

“se there was a matter of half a ream of brown paper stuck upon me, from first to last. As I laid all of a heap in our kitchen, plastered all over, you might have thought I was a large brown-paper parcel, chock full of nothing but groans. Did I groan loud, Wackford, or did I groan soft?' asked Mr Squeers, appealing to his son.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“The sober truth is that the most important civil rights battles were fought and won four decades before the Obama presidency. The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society. Blacks have become their own worst enemy, and liberal leaders do not help matters by blaming self-inflicted wounds on whites or “society.” The notion that racism is holding back blacks as a group, or that better black outcomes cannot be expected until racism has been vanquished, is a dodge. And encouraging blacks to look to politicians to solve their problems does them a disservice. As the next chapter explains, one lesson of the Obama presidency—maybe the most important one for blacks—is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“I envy thee not thy faith, which is ever in thy mouth but never in thy heart nor in thy practice”
― Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“Education is not the only area where an oppositional black mindset has been detrimental to social and economic progress. Black cultural attitudes toward work, authority, dress, sex, and violence have also proven counterproductive, inhibiting the development of the kind of human capital that has lead to socioeconomic advancement for other groups.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“I have heard men talk about the blessings of freedom," he said to himself, "but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.”
― Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“Supporting Obama regardless of his job performance is therefore seen by many blacks as not only the right thing to do but the “black” thing to do.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“The way I see it," Miles went on, "it's no good hiding yourself away, like Pa and lots of other people. And it's no good just thinking of your own pleasure, either. People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“A culture that takes pride in ignorance and mocks learnedness has a dim future. And those who attempt to make excuses for black social pathology rather than condemning these behaviors in no uncertain terms are part of the problem.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“There is a much stronger case to be made that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation. Social welfare programs that were initiated or greatly expanded during the 1960s resulted in the government effectively displacing black fathers as breadwinners, and made work less attractive. Even before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began in earnest, New York and other states had already been expanding their social welfare programs. And despite the best intentions, the results were not encouraging.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning - never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel. It began the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time when accident, or fate, bring lives together. When people are led to do things, they've never done before. On this summer's day, not so very long ago, the wheel set lives in motion in mysterious ways.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“Dad himself used to tell a story about one time when Mother went off to fill a lecture engagement and left him in charge at home. When Mother returned, she asked him if everything had run smoothly.
Didn't have any trouble except with that one over there,' he replied. 'But a spanking brought him into line.'
Mother could handle any crisis without losing her composure.
That's not one of ours, dear,' she said. 'He belongs next door.”
― Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Cheaper by the Dozen

“Today Asian Americans are the nation’s best-educated and highest-earning racial group. A 2013 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Asians age 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees, versus 31 percent of whites and 18 percent of blacks. The median household income for Asians is $66,000, which is $12,000 more than white households and double that of black households. Yet Asians have little political clout in the United States.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“The NAACP’s agenda is about deflecting blame away from blacks and maintaining the relevance of the NAACP. Lemon’s agenda is about personal responsibility. The social science, of course, overwhelmingly supports what both O’Reilly and Lemon are saying, even though many liberals want to ignore it and attack the messengers.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Wherever they might wander out in the world, whithersoever they might fare, forgetful of their mother, she felt as though for her their life must still be an action of her life, they must still be as one with herself as they had been when she alone in all the world knew of the new life which lay hidden within and drank of her blood and made her cheeks pale.” –p. 329-30”
― Sigrid Undset

“You must have known it yourself, Erlend- a thicket of briers and thorns and nettles had you sowed around you- how could you draw a young maid in to your side and she not be torn and wounded and bleeding-“ –p. 93”
― Sigrid Undset

“The spectacle of a black president’s black attorney general pretending that the black franchise is in jeopardy in twenty-first-century America struck many people as intellectually dishonest political pandering.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“She had never set store enough by the gift she had got when God granted her so many children. And the worst was that understood it she had in a fashion. But she had thought more on the troubles, the pangs, the fears and struggles – though she had learned over and over again, through what she missed each time a fresh one lay upon her bosom – that the joy was unspeakably greater than the labour and the pain…
A woman must be held young, she deemed, so long as she had little children sleeping in her arms at night, playing about their mother in the day-time, and needing her care day and night. When her little ones have grown too great for this, a mother is an old woman.” - p. 288”
― Sigrid Undset

“Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it to the point where black youths have adopted jail fashion in the form of baggy, low-slung pants and oversize T-shirts. Hip-hop music immortalizes drug dealers and murderers.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“I wot well you are more more godly in such-like things that I can ever be—yet, Kristin, ‘tis hard for me to see how it should be a right reading of God’s word to go on, as your way is, ever storing up wrath and never forgetting.”
― Sigrid Undset

“On Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Sylvia's Lovers'.
'Philip Hepuburn worships Sylvia Robson, and finds dishonour' Sylvia Robson worships Charley Kinraid, and finds disillusionment. Charley Kinraid worships himself, and finds a career in the Royal Navy and an heiress who agrees with him.”
― Lucinda Elliot

“Robert, men can love what is beneath them—things unworthy, stained, dishonoured.  We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything. ”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“Many a one has been comforted in their sorrow by seeing a good dish come upon the table.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

“My father once made us," she began, "keep a diary, in two columns; on one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really had happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives," (a tear dropped upon my hand at these words) - "I don't mean that mine has been sad, only so very different to what I expected.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

“No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“Well! what is there remarkable in all this? Why have I recorded it? Because, reader, it was important enough to give me a cheerful evening, a night of pleasing dreams, and a morning of felicitous hopes. Shallow-brained cheerfulness, foolish dreams, unfounded hopes, you would say; and I will not venture to deny it: suspicions to that effect arose too frequently in my own mind. But our wishes are like tinder: the flint and steel of circumstances are continually striking out sparks, which vanish immediately, unless they chance to fall upon the tinder of our wishes; then, they instantly ignite, and the flame of hope is kindled in a moment.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“But our wishes are like tinder: the flint and steel of circumstances are continually striking out sparks, which vanish immediately, unless they chance to fall upon the tinder of our wishes; then, they instantly ignite, and the flame of hope is kindled in a moment.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“Because, my dear, beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall