#din

Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art. ↗

— Alan Dean Foster

#art #become #better #characters #considerably

Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order? ↗

— John W. Foster

#book #books #economy #except #exclusively

Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public. ↗

— Ron Fournier

#barack obama #behalf #brutish #building #campaign

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. ↗

— John Fowles

#critical #duty #largely #pretending #trivial

There is an abundance of misinformation, exaggeration, and blatant lies being spread by interest groups regarding the prospects for embryonic stem cell research. ↗

— Virginia Foxx

#being #blatant #cell #cell research #embryonic

They meant abnormal. Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood. ↗

— Janet Frame

#accepted #could #deciding #divisions #easy

I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English. ↗

— Connie Francis

#english #grandmother #hired #hours #i

everything in our culture tells men and boys to avoid any interest, activity or community dominated by women - and when article after article insists that boys are reading less than girls; when the pop cultural discourse shies away from portraying boys as readers, or closely associates male reading with male unpopularity and outcastness; when the humanities is widely touted as being the feminine alternative to the masculine sciences; when finally, after centuries of exclusion, girls are actually getting a break at something, the consequence is that boys are keeping away in droves. [...]Having been raised to exclude girls from manly pursuits, boys are also reluctant to pursue female ones. If that means reading – and in some cases, sadly, it does, reading and other sedentary or indoor hobbies being viewed as the antithesis of sports, and therefore by extension the enemy of all things masculine – then writing more boy-centric books won’t help. (Unless, of course, your ultimate long-term plan is to take reading away from girls and return it to boys, in which case, you fail everything.) If, on the other hand, you want boys and girls to be reading with equal passion and in equal numbers, then a very clear alternative presents itself: teach your boys that there’s nothing wrong with girls, or girl things, period. Take away the stigma, and let everyone read without judgement. Stories are genderless, no matter who writes or stars in them. And if we can’t bear to teach our teenagers that, then we need to seriously rethink our sstatus as an equal and fair society. ↗

— Foz Meadows

#equality #gender #rasiing-boys #stories #teaching-boys-to-read

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it? ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#back #book #does #else #family

The problem was with Bill Clinton, the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting was leading him in the wrong direction. His closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out. ↗

— Louis Freeh

#bill clinton #burst #clinton #closets #compass