July 4 Quotes

At one point, the entire wagon train came to a halt when the soldiers and officers on horseback fell asleep in their saddles.
Few words were spoken between the boys on the journey; their thoughts were filled with the voices of those around them. The wounded men sang a song of sorrow to the rhythm of the rain. It was a never-ending song, for when one man died there was another who took his place in the chorus of the suffering. The song served as a cadence for the five thousand who marched by their side.
(The Confederate retreat from Gettysburg. July 4, 1863)
Excerpt From: Sheila W. Slavich. "Jumpin' the Rails!." XlibrisUS, 2016-03-16T04:00:00+00:00. iBooks.
This material is protected by copyright. ~ Sheila W Slavich

July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so ~ Mark Twain

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~ Erma Bombeck

O, beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties,
Above the fruited plain ... ~ Katharine Lee Bates

What Are the Odds? Here's an astonishing fact: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were the only signers of the Declaration of Independence to become president, both died on July 4, 1826. ~ Kendra Hazlett Armstrong

July 4 is the perfect day to relax. It also provides a very good chance to spend quality time with friends and family since everyone is able to get away from the hassles of every day life, such as work. ~ Colin Chapman

It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day. ~ Rinker Buck

I got married in Vegas on Warped Tour on July 4 - that's how crazy my life has been. ~ Geoff Rickly

Cape Cod baseball dates back to the time of the Civil War. A poster at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown touts a round-trip train ride from Hyannis to Sandwich on July 4, 1885 - the occasion of the 14th annual baseball game between Sandwich and Barnstable. ~ Jane Leavy

There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

I guess like any writer or screenwriter I'm alone in my own world so much of the time that I'm often trying to force myself out of my world. Into more risk. A less controlled kind of inspiration. I'm so keenly aware of how easy it's getting to not leave the house, with Amazon, especially. ~ Miranda July

Tom O' Bedlam among the Sunflowers"

To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . .
I woke this morning before your dream had shredded
And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold,

Six-sided - more than that - broken on flagstones,
Petals the color of a wedding band.
You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold.

Perhaps I made those flowers in my head,
For I have counted snowflakes in July
Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium,

And I have stepped into your dream at night,
A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight.
I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver.

Love, the stars have fallen into the garden
And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand.
It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets.

This morning the garden is littered with dry petals
As yellow as the page of an old book.
I step among them. They are brittle as bone china. ~ Thomas James

When I was placed upon the block," Hughes remembered, "a Mr. McGee came up and felt of me and asked me what I could do. 'You look like a right smart nigger,' said he, 'Virginia always produces good darkies.'" In fact, more than two-thirds of the people transported to New Orleans between July 1829 and the end of 1831 came from the three states of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. The combined share for North Carolina and the Chesapeake - the oldest ~ Edward E. Baptist

Show us life, now ~ Miranda July

In mid-July 2007, after a routine mammogram, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. As cancer diagnoses go, mine wasn't particularly scary. The affected area was small, and the surgeon seemed to think that a lumpectomy followed by radiation would eradicate the cancerous tissue. ~ Virginia Postrel

That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it. ~ Miranda July

That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive. ~ Barack Obama

My daughter just graduated college and she's a dance major. She's done a couple of dance videos already and won Miss Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. She's going out for Miss United States the second week of July, out in Las Vegas. She will probably wind up going to New York and trying the Broadway thing. ~ Doug Flutie

More than two hundred Aberowen men were killed on the first day of July, there on the banks of the Somme River. I have been told that the total of British casualties is over fifty thousand! ~ Ken Follett

He studied the composition of food-stuffs, and knew exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates his body needed; and by scientific chewing he said that he tripled the value of all he ate, so that it cost him eleven cents a day. About the first of July he would leave Chicago for his vacation, on foot; and when he struck the harvest fields he would set to work for two dollars and a half a day, and come home when he had another year's supply - a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was the nearest approach to independence a man could make "under capitalism," he explained; he would never marry, for no sane man would allow himself to fall in love until after the revolution. ~ Upton Sinclair

I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction. THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2013 ~ Paula Hawkins

We've staked our future on our ability to follow the Ten Commandments with all our heart. ~ James Madison

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" - was that it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished - how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages. ~ Virginia Woolf

I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Just about done here." Kowalski sat cross-legged on the ground. Coiled at his feet was a spool of detonation cord threaded through cubes of C4. "It's just like stringing popcorn." "Remind me not to come over to your house for Christmas." He shrugged. "Christmas is okay. It's Fourth of July that scares most people away." Painter could only imagine. Kowalski plus fireworks. Not a good combination. ~ James Rollins

I came to my first Colts training camp in July of 1950, and it was murder, absolute murder. We had a coach named Clem Crow who must have been nuts. You got to remember that I'd been a Marine, had gone through basic training and spent 26 months in the Pacific during WWII, but the Marine drill instructors had nothing on Clem. ~ Art Donovan

I went to work the next day out of curiosity, as people return to their villages after the war to see what is left. ~ Miranda July

The - the prophecy ... the prediction ... Trelawney ... "
"Ah, yes. How much did you relay to Lord Voldemort?"
"Everything - everything I heard! That is why - it is for that reason - he thinks it means Lily Evans!"
"The prophecy did not refer to a woman. It spoke of a boy born at the end of July - "
"You know what I mean! He thinks it means her son, he is going to hunt her down - kill them all - "
"If she means so much to you, surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?"
"I have - I have asked him - "
"You disgust me. ~ J.K. Rowling

Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I've put together in Archer City. The collection - or, more properly, the accumulation - now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there.

-- "On Rereading," NYRB July 14, 2005 ~ Larry McMurtry

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. ~ George Washington

If she was going to live in Cow's Bowels, New York, she wanted the complete small town package. She wanted a Fourth of July parade, a country fair with an oxen pull and a pie-eating contest, and she wanted a little, homey mom-and-pop supermarket, run by Mr. Whipple himself. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

I'm to have dinner with some people from the bookshop, which is as posh as the motel, at six, then read at seven-thirty. I will have to watch my mouth. Some sarcastic remark about gentrification is almost bound to slip out. Even though the topography is right, this doesn't even look like Vermont. Not a cow in sight, not a single shack held together with staples and Masonite. Where are my people? The ones who used to go to Canada automatically at age 18 and get all their teeth pulled out, a standard right of passage. The ones who believe you can't be an alcoholic if you drink nothing but beer. The ones who know how to roast a haunch of venison with onions and garlic and sage and mustard (and where to find the haunch in July). The ones who buy their clothes at rummage and their cars at the junkyard. The ones who used to be me. Here I am on my balcony with a finger or two of cognac, a cigar, and a laptop computer, wearing my black jeans and my Reeboks. God, it's awful. ~ Hayden Carruth

Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two! ~ David Sedaris

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way. ~ Miranda July

Liberty is the breath of life to nations. ~ George Bernard Shaw

It will be undertaken, of course, in the June or July summit, and then to bring NATO closer to Russia or vice versa is a way to move toward integration - toward the integration of Europe. ~ Warren Christopher

Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers. ~ Sara Coleridge

Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the r, the sentences starting with "so," and the sliding response of "oh really," but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort, the twisting of lip, the curling of tongue. If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember how to produce those American sounds. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You've got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They're rich but they're also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you've got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don't have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It's totally enticing. ~ Miranda July

The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which suggests that women were still wearing painted nails within the safety of their homes. ~ Virginia Postrel

This record was supposed to come out in July already, but it just got delayed and delayed, so, well, I guess it was just coincidence. ~ Kerry King

The mission statement was ordered, and it sent the 800th MP Brigade, effective the first of July, up to Baghdad. I joined my brigade to take command at the end of June. ~ Janis Karpinski

Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author ~ Thomas Jefferson

A teenage Filipino boy walked up to the car and just stood there, the way people do when disaster strikes. ~ Miranda July

July 25 Suffering in life is really nothing more than the difference between the way things are and the way you imagine they should be. If you can come to accept the blessings of your present reality without always feeling that your life is hollow as compared to the lives of others, you will have taken a quantum leap toward becoming a happier, more peaceful person. ~ Robin S. Sharma