thought-provoking

The real strength of therose bush is not in the flowers but in the roots and the branches.

You can be proud of your country and culture and, at the same time, recognize that there is something that's wrong that needs to be changed.

Too much time will do that to you. Blur the edges between your memories and your imagination until everything feels like something you saw in a movie instead of your life.

God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.

The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment, if only while beset with fears, step out of line and do "something", however small. And even the smallest, most unheroic of acts adds to the store of kindling that may be ignited by some surprising circumstance into tumultuous change.

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? _ Little children were trained not to do __ust what they liked_ but _ but what? _ Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities.When you are trained to despise __ust what you like_ then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others _ a good slave. When you learn not to do __ust what you like_ then the System loves you.

Maybe I'm not so different from everyone else after all. It's like somebody gave me a puzzle, but I don't have the box with the picture on it. So I don't know what the final thing is supposed to look like. I'm not even sure if I have all the pieces.

None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.

How do you explain to your friend's mother why a night out with friends has left her daughter dying from an ecstasy overdose?

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops_I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

There's still a question I must put to you," said the cunger woman. "Can you give up Joshua to keep him?

There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.

An entire aisle of cereal...hundreds of choices....Of course I had eaten cereal before. I'm not a savage....Cereal was a small, affordable luxury. An effort. A point of pride. Something special....Those crates of cereal meant that we deserved what others do not.... Here the choices that stand before me in the store aisles seem to exist only to mock me. Cereal isn't a luxury...the boxes laugh at me...Two aisles down I count 27 varieties of peanut butter....it is really necessary?

When I asked her if she was afraid to fall in love, she damn near doubled over. "Afraid? My heart has been through hell and back. Yet it never quits, refuses to rest, gives without asking in return, and is deeper than the deepest sea. It's love, my dear, that should fear me." That night my heart was signed, by my one of a kind.

I have mo prejudice against the Southern people... They are just what we would ben in their situation. If slavery did not now exits amongst them, they wld not inrtoduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up... I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. (p52)

The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who grew up with TV and movies and now the internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script