#ned

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fairies #hero-worship #john-f-kennedy #kennedy-family #politics

Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain. ↗

— Mildred D. Taylor

#mississippi-writers #family

To err is human. To errah is Kennedy. ↗

— James DeAcutis

#crooks #drunk #kennedy-family #family

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family") ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#planned-community #beauty

I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside. ↗

— Mo Udall

#caucus #difference #i #i have learned #learned

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#another #beads #byron #child #feel

Chef don't judge. ↗

— Chef Boyardee

#chef-boyardee #humor #food

In your daily life, let your destined visions be farther than your gifted sight and your ultimate joy be vibrant than your demeaning worries. Think big, dream big. ↗

— Israelmore Ayivor

#daily-life #demeaning #destined #destiny #divine

I think real forgiveness is a gift someone has to earn, and I don’t even have to worry about Kalona asking for my forgiveness unless he’s worthy of even considering it, and I just don’t see that happening. ↗

— P.C. Cast

#house-of-night #forgiveness

You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realisation that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social conventions to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#nihilism #ruined-youth #anger