What do Americans want?

"The American people," Dacheekan [campaign strategist] said, "are interested only in little things, not big things. They want to be fat., They want to be happy. That's all they care about, all they know. That's the reality."

"I have been with the people of this country from the Hudson to the Pacific," Freddy said, "and I know that you're wrong. It's people like you, who are no better than your contemptuous description of them, who crank the machinery that dulls their lives, who cater to the worst among them. They are a spiritual people. They want love and greatness. I know it. I've seen it. I've lived among them as you have not. I was taught to listen to the deeper heart, and from one end of this country to the other, I have."

Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 463

What soccer moms want

"What about issues?" Dot asked. "What about soccer moms?"

"What about them?" Freddy wanted to know.

"What should he [the presidential candidate] say? What would you have him say?"

"Soccer moms," Freddy said, "spend all day driving around in shapeless vehicles that look like Flash Gordon's bread truck, and their children watch television in the back and ape the superficial characters therein. This is the cause of deep unhappiness, because what they want is so different from what they have, even if they don't realise that this is so. They don't want their children to dress like circus clowns, speak like zombie chipmunks, and behave like programmed machines. They want sons and daughters they can talk to; they want a struggle that they can win but that they are not assured of winning; they want to know physical exhaustion; they want to be sunburned; they want to smell eucalyptus; they want to weep; they want to dance naked for their husbands; they want to feel the wind, see the stars, swim in a river, slam the back door, and laugh uncontrollably with their children. That's what they want. They don't want the crap they have, the crap [President] Self promises, or the crap you would promise if you could figure out what to promise. They want to be free, to have dignity, to know honour and sacrifice. What else does anyone want?"

Dot was stunned into silence, because this was what she wanted too, and had always wanted.

Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 463

Albright's path to enlightenment

Some people pursue enlightenment by sitting quietly and probing their inner consciousness; I make plane reservations.

Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story f Remembrance and War, 1937 – 1948 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 12.

Ancient Greek view of misfortune as the luck of the draw

Instead of trying to justify evil with a system of sin and punishment, the ancient Greeks accepted misfortune as the luck of the draw. It made complete sense to me—how could it not?—having fallen from a balcony at four, having lost my father at six, watching my mother's way of life disappear while at the same time discovering my community turning on me as an object of scorn and derision, living in an age when the newsreels projected death and destruction and the industrial annihilation of an entire people. Somehow the Christian notion that one gets what one deserves was too odious.

Charles Rowan Beye, My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 82.

Vowell sees her own hypocricies

My small life in the surface world is a contradictory,  hypocritical mess in which I scowl through newspaper articles about the abuses of the timber industry while sitting in my maple chair next to my maple bookcase. Isn't that how most of us live in this country?

Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 138

College students hunger (not just for Doritos, apparently)

There is an intense hunger among today's students, my travels in the last few years have shown me, for what college ought to be providing but is not: for a larger sense of purpose and direction; for an experience at school that speaks to them as human beings, not bundles of aptitudes; for guidance in addressing the important questions of life; for simple permission to think about these things and a vocabulary with which to do so.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 73

Universities have forgotten larger educational role

Universities, writes Harry R. Lewis, the former Harvard dean, "have forgotten their larger educational role for college students": to help them figure out who they are and what their purpose in the world should be.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 60

Life is short: work for freedom

[Jim] Bevel had been known to take his young trainees to a graveyard and say, "in forty years you are going to be here. Now, what are you going to do while you're alive?"

The schoolchildren went nuts. No one had ever talked to them like that, goading them to freedom rather than coaxing them into "gittin' an education."

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 343.

How much do you have to do?

9. You are not responsible for the rest of the world. I sponsor two children, one in the United States and one in Indonesia. I do it because it doesn’t cost very much and because maybe it will help them somehow. I also recycle and give money to the Friends Committee to Abolish the Death Penalty. But that’s about it. I used to want to join every group that worked for something I believe in. But then reading all those mailings and trying to divvy up my annual contributions budget between 327 different organizations just got to be too much. So I picked a couple I think work and I stick with them. You can’t save everything or everyone. All you can do is your little bit. Someone else can worry about the whales. I’ve got Indonesia covered.

Michael Thomas Ford, “Scraps,” in James L. Harmon, ed., Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two 79, 82 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

The world before us

"How did the world ever manage without me before I was born?" he wondered. "Didn't they feel something was missing?" 

William Steig, Dominic (New York: HarperCollins, Sunburst ed., 1984), p. 85. (First published in 1972)

History lives and breathes

It seems to me that one of the most unfortunate things about human beings is their inability to feel the living breath lying behind and supporting them in their everyday lives. History is by no means a mere succession of long-past events to be arbitrarily explained and interpreted by modern man. Like the gradually accumulating rings of a tree, history lives and breathes in our everyday lives. Only those who can feel this life in the midst of the present moment are truly fulfilled. I think that much of the alienation and emptiness of modern life is caused by an outlook completely oriented toward the present, a present which has been cut off from its roots in history. Such an outlook is out of touch with its own foundations—it has, in a way, abandoned the source of its own life. 

Takashi Hirose, Lectures on Shin Buddhism (1980), posted on Tricycleblog, A Blog of All Things Buddhist, Brought to You by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, http://tricycleblog.blogspot.com/, 3/10/06. (The site is no longer up, but you can read it on the Internet Archive.)

Opportunities opened and shut

Our glittering system of elite higher education: students kill themselves getting into it, parents kill themselves to pay for it, and always for the opportunities it opens up. But what of all the opportunities it closes down—not for any practical reason, but just because of how it smothers you with expectations? How can I become a teacher, or a minister, or a carpenter? Wouldn't that be a waste of my fancy education? What would my parents think? What would my friends think? How would I face my classmates at our twentieth reunion, when they're all rich doctors or important people in New York? And the question that exists behind them all: isn't it beneath me? So an entire world of possibilities shuts, and you miss your true calling. 

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), pp. 24-25

Antidote for anguish

Believing that we are always doing the best we can, whether we intend to or not, and whether we like it or not, has turned out to be my antidote for anguish. It's my comforting but unverifiable beliefs I no longer think that I bear sole responsibility for who I am, what I do, or what I become. I share responsibility for those things with something infinitely larger than my conscious self—a higher power, which I call nature, although I don't have any objection if you prefer to call it God on my behalf. The experience of human freedom and responsibility loses some of its terrifying significance when it is placed in a larger context.

Mark Salzman, Man in the Empty Boat (New York: Open Road, 2012), ch. 23 (Kindle location 1981)