“Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall.
Piper”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“Sometimes things need to get broken”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“My mother taught me how to find grace in wreckage. She taught me not how to reassemble, but how to rearrange. The stained-glass pictures she made were certain evidence that things can be broken and put back together, and that the mended thing will be more beautiful than the original.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“That's the way with sentimental things: it's the memory the junk conjures that's valuable, not the junk itself.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon
“How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from A Pair of Blue Eyes
“It was inevitable that Red China would invade Tibet, and then there would be no place for us two friends of Tibetan independence.”
― Heinrich Harrer, quote from Seven Years in Tibet (Paladin Books)
“Es verdad que es imposible conocer a fondo a las personas, todas son insondables.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, quote from The Time of the Hero
“Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...
McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history.
The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Best and the Brightest
“Peer pressure is when you decide to lob a few warheads at this week's Nazi because CNN told you to.”
― Nick Cole, quote from The Old Man and the Wasteland
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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