#rita

God will try our faith before he satisfies our sight. ↗

— William Bates

#reformed #faith

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#heritage #faith

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. ↗

— Amy Tan

#concepts #daughters #family #fear #heritage

All the Kamals were fluent in irritation. They loved each other but were almost always annoyed by each other, in ways that were both generalised and existential (why is he like that?) and also highly specific (how hard is it to remember to put the top back on the yoghurt?). ↗

— John Lanchester

#irritation #love #relationships #family

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were -- inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#family #heritage #identity #morality #past

She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night. ↗

— Alexandra Fuller

#family #family

Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. ↗

— Lucille Ball

#communist #freedom #national-heritage #politics #rights

If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our minds left behind in battle. ↗

— Margarita Engle

#poetry #the-surrender-tree #war #freedom

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings. ↗

— Rita Dove

#rita-dove #imagination

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce—to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne—who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues. ↗

— David Markson

#lenny-bruce #m-forster #nathaniel-hawthorne #norms #puritanism