Art of Quotation

“ I divide the world into people who want to control something and those who want to make something.”

— Henri Cole, poet, in The Paris Review

“ we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”

Amanda Gorman, poet, 2021 Inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry. A sea we must wade. We braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do…

“Poetry is not a luxury”

Audre Lorde, writer

“ Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.”

Tom Brokaw, 80, is formally retiring from NBC News after an extraordinary 55 years with the network.

“… keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.” Hank Aaron, 1934-2021

“ Even though the Wizard is on his way out, Oz still exists.”

Excerpt:

With his vast coterie of enablers willing to believe his baseless assertions about the election, Mr. Naftali said, Trump might be better compared to the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.”

[Timothy Naftali, a history professor at New York University]

“Many of us assumed that Trump’s behind-the-curtain moment — when Dorothy arrived and, thanks to Toto, found out that the Wizard was a…

“After the past five years of hatred, of vitriol, I know what to do with the rest of our lives. It’s to elect moral, ethical, decent human beings to be the parental body at the dinner table of the nation of the world.”

“After the past five years of hatred, of vitriol, I know what to do with the rest of our lives. It’s to elect moral, ethical, decent human beings to be the parental body at the dinner table of the nation of the world.”

source: Washington Post, 10/31/2020

Mandy Patinkin, actor

“ I do believe that as much as it is the writer’s job to write well, it is the listener’s job to listen well.”

I take it you saw the people playing “Born in the U.S.A.” outside Walter Reed when President Trump was there earlier this month. How did that make you feel? Decades after Reagan, people still seem to be misunderstanding that song.

That is my lot in life. [Laughs] That is my lot in life and I have learned to live with it with a smile. I mean, I do believe that as much as it is the writer’s job…

“ Where has the America I love, and that the world used to respect, gone? How did we allow this to happen? And what can we do to stop it?”

To the New York Times Editor:

Who stole my “America the Beautiful”?

I’m 7,000 miles from home because of Covid-19. We were locked down in April in New Zealand and are still here.

I read The New York Times each day to try to keep up with America. Week by week, it has been getting worse. But today, the combination of headlines about President Trump’s deranged rantings and about the…