#erica

As far as carrying the American banner, you just do what's right for the kids. ↗

— Dennis Farina

#as far as #banner #carrying #far #just

Millions of American families affected by debilitating diseases have new hope today after the U.S. House passed legislation to support potentially life-saving stem cell research. ↗

— Nancy L. Johnson

#after #american #american families #cell #cell research

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#american-indians #humor #tolstoy #family

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration. ↗

— Howard Mumford Jones

#american writer #asked #celebration #died #emerson

I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people. ↗

— Mary Harris Jones

#american people #before #country #facts #get

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

Whereas European films have traditionally been able to go into adult relationships. I think there's a huge audience in America for those kinds of films. ↗

— Philip Kaufman

#adult #america #audience #been #european

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny. ↗

— Barbara Jordan

#america #common #community #destiny #difficult

Let's all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable. ↗

— Barbara Jordan

#american #american idea #cannot #country #discarded

I've always been crazy for the American songbook. ↗

— Ashley Judd

#american #been #crazy #i #songbook