Scott Simon Quotes

Despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant's gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside.

Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.

I take Charb's point, but at some point has Charlie Hebdo been trying to have it both ways because some of what they do is not funny.

Race, blood, lineage, and nationality don't matter; they're just the way that small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it's warm and that it beats through a loving heart.

Adoption is rewarding. But the process, as we have already detailed in some particulars, can be expensive, exhausting, and hard to sustain on a dream, much less a whim.

Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, but he won more than 12 million votes in the primaries and was respectfully and elaborately saluted by Hillary Clinton, whom he has endorsed.

AR-15s, in particular, are often called America's gun. They're some of the most popular rifles in the country, especially when it comes to sports shooting.

Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child?

Parenthood is shit, snot, slime, fear, tears, spit, and spills. It's as intense as combat, which is to say hours of tedium relieved by moments of alarm and flashes of joy to remind you that you're alive. It is intensely practical and profoundly square, even if you're not. It's feeding, wiping, and picking up.

Camille died a few days later. Our daughter's hearts bear the first real cracks they have had to endure since we came into each other's lives. Our girls had a lot of laughs to give Camille in the years ahead; she had a lot of love for them. But I think that some lives are like diamonds. They pack a lot of light and brilliance into a small space.

I've always been passionate about what I do and want to do it well, ... My wife says she's a widow to the computer.

Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes.

A THOUSAND WORDS

My stepfather Ralph Newman was a merry and remarkable man, a former minor league second baseman who broke his nose on a double play ball and wound up opening the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago. He was also president of the Chicago Public Library.

Ralph used to huff about that phrase, A picture is worth a thousand words and ask, "Does anyone really stop to figure out what you could do with a thousand words?"

And, rather in the way that my daughters and I trade, try out, and create stories with each other, my stepfather and I spread out a napkin and came up with this:

One picture is worth a thousand words? You give me a thousand words and I can give you:
the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm,
the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the last graphs of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington, and the final entry of Anne Frank's diary.

You give me a thousand words, and I don't think I'd trade you for any picture on earth.

Exactly who is this God character who is said to be all-powerful yet needs to hire lawyers to take us to court? Isn't he miffed when someone he had always considered to be a true follower turns to the legal system rather than to prayer? Why would the faithful risk making God look ridiculous by losing a trial on Earth when he is certain to win every trial in heaven?

Believe me, those great death bed speeches are written ahead of time.

They will grow up knowing that they should be only proud about being adopted. I will consider it a parental failure if our daughters ever try to use it as some kind of excuse.

There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth.

One of the reasons we think this market will start to run out of gas at some point is that you've essentially created as much gold from straw as you can from this financial alchemy

And I don't even have to include Joseph adoption Jesus to make that point, though it is irresistible to add that Joseph and Mary had to go through a lot fewer interviews than my wife and I did. Well, maybe one major one.

Almost every continent in the world, including our own, has refugees. But how often when we hear the word do we pause to remind ourselves what being a refugee means?

Imagine the talented love-child of Andr Previn and Lucille Ball.

Srebrenica's not simply another reminder of man's inhumanity to man, but how intelligent people can always come up with intelligent reasons to do nothing.

So: this is where we are going to become parents. You walk into the building as a couple, and leave a few minutes later as a family. You walk in recollecting long romantic dinners, nights at the theater, and care-free vacations. You leave worrying about where to get diapers, milk, and Cheerios.