Simon Graham: I came over with the British trade mission, oh, years ago. I was soon relieved of my position. I had a rather unfortunate tendency to tell the truth in a country where no one ever says what they mean. So now, I very accurately translate...
Simin: Your daughter's future isn't important to you? Judge: There are a lot of children who live in this country. You say none of them have a future? Simin: I prefer my child doesn't grow up in this situation. I have the right as a mother. Judge: Wh...
Howard Simons: Then can we use their names? Carl Bernstein: No. Ben Bradlee: Goddammit, when is somebody going to go on the record in this story? You guys are about to write a story that says the former Attorney General, the highest-ranking law enfor...
Richard Vernon: You think about this: when you get old, these kids - when *I* get old - they're going to be running the country. Carl: Yeah. Richard Vernon: Now this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That when I get older, t...
In fact, among the people I met, the term served essentially as a synonym for 'fucked up'. I'd been in the country about three days when a car that was sent to take me to an interview failed to start. After several attempts to get it going, the drive...
We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help... When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I w...
We should be proud of our country when we have done something to be proud of, when we have lived up to our own standards. But the flip side of genuine pride is being able to recognize when we have fallen short, and to hold ourselves to account.
I lived with them in my studio in New York. And of course if I were doing that book today or even ten years, fifteen years later, I would have gone to where the wild ducks were and where I could study them - I would have gone to the country somewhere...
In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that w...
The park lies directly downwind from a slew of coal plants. Virtually all of the major contaminants in the local air and water are direct results of coal emissions. Coal produces ozone, which kills trees. Coal produces sulfates, which kill fish. No o...
No man succeeds without faith. Whether you call it religious faith or label it something else. I don't feel anything worthwhile is accomplished without it. When you believe there is a Supreme Being guiding the destiny of this universe and that within...
Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United State...
But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little m...
It was during my enchanted days of travel that the idea came to me, which, through the years, has come into my thoughts again and again and always happily—the idea that geology is the music of the earth.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn’t throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.
The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the deat...
That's where you're wrong. To really understand music, to love it for what it is, you have to be open-minded and go into everything thinking you might find a new part of yourself. It can only make your heart bigger.
We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.
They danced slow circles in the sand, Javier singing the words to the Spanish version of the song, the melancholy music putting a strange ache in his chest, an ache he saw reflected in her eyes. Was she feeling what he was feeling?
NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: An addict and a non-addict don’t think the same — their brains are wired completely differently. Only an addict can help another addict through recovery.
