#anita

We do foreign assistance for altruistic reasons, certainly for humanitarian reasons, of course. But the main reason we do foreign assistance is we do it in the American national interest. ↗

— Roger Wicker

#american #assistance #certainly #course #foreign

Auggie said you were too sentimental for your own good sometimes." Out loud he said, "Perhaps, but you have taught me that sentiment is not always a bad thing." I stared up at that impossibly beautiful face, and felt love swell up inside me like a physical force. It filled my body, swelling upward until it made my chest ache, my throat tighten, and my eyes burn. It sounded so stupid. But I loved him. Loved all of him, but loved him more because loving me had made him better. That he would say that I had taught him about being sentimental made me want to cry. Richard reminded me at every turn that I was bloodthirsty and cold. If that were true, then I couldn't have taught Jean-Claude about sentimentality. You can't learn, if you don't have it to teach. He kissed me. He kissed me softly, with one hand lost in the hair to the side of my face. He drew back and whispered, "I never thought to see that look upon your face, not for me." "I love you," I said, and touched his hand where it lay against my face. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#jean-claude #beauty

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room. ↗

— Anita Shreve

#death #life #the-pilot-s-wife #death

Sometimes you fight what you are, and sometimes you give in to it. And some nights you just don’t want to fight yourself anymore, so you pick someone else to fight. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#blake #blue #moon #quote #dreams

I knew what was like to finally be seduced by the thing you hunted. Mine just happened to be a more traditional seduction. Okay, at least I was still among the living. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#blake #hunter #vampire #dreams

I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#life-experience #philosophy #wisdom #dreams

Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think. Did that sound hopeless? It didn't feel hopeless. It felt reassuring. It felt - real. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#vampires #blood

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough. ↗

— Robert D. Kaplan

#humanitarian-intervention #idealism #interventionism #iraq #noninterventionism

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out. ↗

— Niall Ferguson

#interventionism #isolationism #noninterventionism #realpolitik #sovereignty

There had to be a circle of Hell where you were eternally fourteen, eternally in junior high. One of the lower circles. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#funny #funny