#eric

Our identities are as fluid as our personal experiences are diverse. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#human-experience #identity #journey-in-life #journeying #race

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. ↗

— Trevanian

#satire #social-commentary #experience

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#paul-elie #faith

[Martin Luther King] said that little black boys and little black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers. Then he reminded both those spectators before him and all Americans that this hope of his, this faith, was rooted in the promise of America. ↗

— Keith Ellison

#civil-rights #inspirational #politics #promises #united

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all. ↗

— Benjamin C. Bradlee

#american politics #bodies #clout #had #history

Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can. ↗

— Gloria Mallette

#books #family #marriage #psychological-suspense #family

I thought about the cameras following me in the terminal and pictured my family watching my entrance on TV. I hoped they’d be proud. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#family

Who wants a bag of bones?” he said, with absolute sincerity. “I don’t want to hurt myself on the sharp edges of the woman I’m bedding. ↗

— Charlaine Harris

#family

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. ↗

— Willa Cather

#environment #native-american #death

With the rise of America, the global balance of power shifted away from the old European powers. ↗

— Armstrong Williams

#away #balance #balance of power #european #european powers