#sen

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fairies #hero-worship #john-f-kennedy #kennedy-family #politics

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good. ↗

— Philip Gourevitch

#apathy #auschewitz #evil #genocide #good

Tragic tales rarely do make sense. ↗

— Gwenn Wright

#gothic #gwenn-wright #mystery #sadness #tragedy

Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father's garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family's land. ↗

— Michael Cunningham

#family

I remember hating having to cross over the Broadway Bridge again, having to leave the peninsula neighborhood and go back to my apartment in downtown Boston. ↗

— Michael Patrick MacDonald

#family

I want to be president because I have the sensitivity, as a woman, to listen. I'm a different candidate... different because I don't belong to powerful, privileged groups, because I'm honest. ↗

— Josefina Vazquez Mota

#belong #candidate #different #groups #honest

In M---, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O---, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; that she was resolved, out of consideration to her family, to marry him. ↗

— Heinrich von Kleist

#pregnancy #family

Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it. But the feelings which made such composure a disgrace, left her in no danger of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with an head-ache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment; giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough! ↗

— Jane Austen

#sensibility #witty-comments #family

The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head. ↗

— James Carlos Blake

#first-sentence #fugitive #family

There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#family