#troubled

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #troubled




While I remain troubled by the Corps' inability to fully justify the Model they used for their commercial traffic predictions, America clearly has an aging lock and dam infrastructure on the Mississippi.


Ron Kind


#america #clearly #commercial #corps #dam

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill. I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... “Stories aren’t real,” he told me shortly. “They don’t feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding ‘family’ in the nearest gang.” Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. “Write down the names of some books,” she said. “Maybe we’ll read them.” I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart. Charles de Lint creates a magical world that’s not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the “magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve long lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people from troubled backgrounds say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going. Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. “Gets harder every year,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He stopped me as I turned to go. “That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books…. Sometimes I pass them to the kids.” “Do they like them?” I asked him curiously. “If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: Stories are important.” And then he looked at me and smiled.


Terri Windling


#charles-de-lint #childhood #fantasy #folklore #magical-realism

A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it.


Stephen M. Irwin


#distancing-self #distrust #haunted #husband #jaded

And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources.


Miriam Makeba


#because #becomes #believe #cause #confusion

Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.


Eugene Delacroix


#herself #language #she #show #soul

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.


Michael Ende


#above #architect #because #building #cheaper

Oddly, I do have a problem with authority. I find it very difficult to knuckle down and follow rules. Which are the classic symptoms of someone who has a troubled relationship with their father. And yet, I never had a problem with my father.


Toby Young


#classic #difficult #down #father #find

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.


Christopher Hampton


#anything #arts #being #belief #devotes

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.


Henri Frederic Amiel


#both #criticism #doubt #enslave #faith

Most Americans will be horrified that President Obama is compromising our deterrent to chemical and biological attacks on this country. Our allies will also be troubled by his aspiration to eliminate U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.


Frank Gaffney


#also #aspiration #attacks #biological #chemical