#al

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#essays #exception #i #interesting #me

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#enjoy #i #i do #most #much

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#industrial #industry #life #menace

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#child #history #identified #jewish #lost

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#aside #begin #complete #desk #drawer

I know I am at the end. I shall never get better, dear. ↗

— Lillie Langtry

#better #dear #end #get #i

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential. ↗

— Barack Obama

#asks #because #buck #certain #focusing

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential. ↗

— Barack Obama

#ambition #cars #clear #clothes #drive

And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation. ↗

— Barack Obama

#american #american people #call #different #different names

My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. ↗

— Barack Obama

#came #christ #christian #christian faith #church