“Because being American is more than a pride we inherit--
It's the past we step into, and how we repair it.”
Source: Call Us What We Carry
“C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats. Periods of grief and suffering often shatter our basic assumptions about who we are and how life works. We tend to assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable, that things are supposed to make sense, that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast all that to smithereens.”
Source: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
“She longed for the shape of the rifle in her hand. How easily the gun made the world change the way she wanted.”
Source: Sky Full of Elephants
“Sometimes, you might find it impossible to change things outside yourself, but you must remember that life isn’t about what happens to you, it is more about how you react to it.”
“It was kind of funny—the thing that had annoyed me so much about him in the beginning was what I dearly appreciated now.”
Source: First & Then
“You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society.”
Source: The Melancholy of Resistance
“You want a problem to fix? Fix how you look at me.”
Source: Five Feet Apart
“Baseball may be called the national pastime, but it survives on the sentimentality of middle-age men who wistfully dream of playing catch with their fathers and sons. Football, with its dull stoppages, lost its military-industrial relevance with the end of the Cold War, and has become as tired and predictable in performance as it is in political metaphor. The professional game floats on an ocean of gambling, the players' steroid-laced bodies having outgrown their muscular and skeletal carriages. Biceps rip from their moorings, ankles break on simple pivots. Achilles' tendons shrivel like slugs doused with salt. Soccer and basketball are the only mainstream sports that truly plug into the modem-pulse of a dot-com society. Soccer is perfectly suited for a country of the hamster-treadmill pace, the remote-control zap and the national attention deficit—two 45-minute halves, the clock never stops, no commercial interruptions, the final whistle blows in less than two hours. It is a fluid game of systemized chaos that, no matter how tightly scripted by coaches, cannot be regulated any more than information can be truly controlled on the Internet.”
Source: The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World – A Provocative Look at 1999 Role Models and Off-Field Race, Class, and Gender Issues
“That was the end of his driving..
That was the end of his walking free..
That was the end of his privacy..
And that was the end of his secret.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate.. headed for New York City, ready to offer the world his talent.
The world, I discovered, was not all that interested.
I wandered around my early twenties, paying rent and reading classifieds and wondering why the lights were not turning green for me.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson