Keenans In North Quotes

It's just money," he replied. "It's just paper."
"It's time," I said, sharper than I'd meant. "It's the means to purchase time. It's the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it's a year's salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it's the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it's not money. It's what it could have been. ~ Claire North

The American revolution, the terms are these: not that I drive you out or that you drive me out, but that we come together and embrace and learn to live together. That is the only way that we can have achieved the American revolution.
Now, if we can face this, it involves facing a great many things. It demands that white people face the fact that I, for example, or any black person they will ever meet or have ever met - I am not an exotic rarity. I am not a stranger. I am none of those things. On the contrary, for all you know, for all you know, I might be your uncle, your brother, your cousin, among other things. One of the things that has happened here - and the pathology of the Deep South proves it; so does the pathology of the North, which dictates to them that they move out and I move in - among other things which have to be excavated here is the fact that this long history is also the history of a love affair. ~ James Baldwin

In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose reminiscent of other clever prose, then the compass needle is slipping away from true north ... When, on the other hand, the author renounces some easy twist, some expected payoff, to take us into territory we didn't expect but that nevertheless fits with the drift of the story, then the novel gains force and conviction. And when he or she does it again, telling quite a different story that is nevertheless driven by the same urgent tensions, then we are likely moving into the zone of authenticity. ~ Tim Parks

I didn't grow up on any sort of border; more in the middle of nowhere, in rural eastern North Carolina. ~ Tim Pratt

Yes, you can lose somebody overnight, yes, your whole life can be turned upside down. Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind. ~ Shania Twain

I retired when the Supreme Court rose for the summer recess in 2009, and a couple of weeks later I drove north from Washington with no regrets about the prior 19 years or about the decision to try living a more normal life for whatever time might remain. ~ David Souter

I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

She found the rolling earthen hills of the north in his eyes. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the new economic opportunities and provided the framework for a judicial system to protect and encourage productive economic activity ~ Douglass North

We may avoid shame if we choose, for shame seldom takes us unawares but has its warning cry, and we can hear that cry as clearly as we can hear the coming of the north wind ... The man lying in the mud hadn't heard the coming of the north wind. ~ Rose Tremain

If the world were an orange with 18 segments meeting at the top (the North Pole), roughly 8 of them would be in Russia, Canada would have 4, Denmark 2, and Norway, Sweden, and the U.S. just one apiece. Only a sliver of Alaska, on the Beaufort Sea, lies above the Arctic Circle. ~ Alex Shoumatoff

I was with a folk trio back in '63 and '64, and we traveled all across North Africa, Israel, and Europe. ~ Creed Bratton

Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

The roads weren't much to speak of, and the car's suspension had been welded in by a stonemason resentful of his change in career. ~ Claire North

I do not think a pilgrimage is a proper pilgrimage if you are also using it as an excuse to visit your favourite aunt, or buy silk cheaply to re-sell," she murmured sombrely. "That's just business dressed up in orange robes. ~ Claire North

In places like Germany or France the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but "our people and them," and "them" can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or North Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United States. ~ Nell Irvin Painter

The hard-fought victories in America's checkered history were won neither with parchment nor with words, but with guns, with blood, and with unimaginable suffering. Slavery, like Nazism and other totalitarian horrors, was vanquished by flying steel, by heartbreak, and by brute force - by whites and blacks who together smashed the institutions that had hijacked American liberty and perverted it for their own profit. But triggers are ultimately pulled by men, and successful campaigns require their practitioners to carry with them more than merely bombs and water. 'Europe was created by history,' Margaret Thatcher liked to say, but 'America was created by philosophy.' That philosophy, established by the founding generation and routinely recruited by the excluded ever since, remains extraordinarily potent - a North Star for wandering discontents within America's borders and without. ~ Charles C.W. Cooke

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south - let all Americans - let all lovers of liberty everywhere - join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations. ~ Abraham Lincoln

I never knew freedom could be such a cruel and difficult thing. Until now, I had always thought that being free meant being able to wear jeans and watch whatever movies I wanted without worrying about being arrested. Now I realized that I had to think all the time -- and it was exhausting. There were times when I wondered whether, if it wasn't for the constant hunger, I would be better off in North Korea, where all my thinking and all my choics were taken care of for me. ~ Yeonmi Park

The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work? ~ Adam Rapp

I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show. ~ Tom Riley

The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result. ~ Donald Harington

I was brought up in a flat in North London - virtually the last building in London, because north of us was countryside all the way to the coast, and south of us was non-stop London for 20 miles. ~ Jim Crace

Just when we are in many ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that our ethical individualism, deriving, as I have argued, from the Protestant religious tradition in America, is linked to an economic individualism that, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money. What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies, including other Protestant societies, a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves are not going to make it all alone. ~ Robert N. Bellah

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. ~ Bill Lambrecht

Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. Not that the Negroes could not and would not fight, for these same blacks, largely under their own officers, had beaten back Louisiana whites at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Bear in mind North Korea has been the leading source, a leading source of nuclear technology and of missile delivery systems to some of the world's great rogues in Iran and Syria. ~ Robert McFarlane

They were like magnets completely drawn to each other, mirroring one another's movements and stances. They were like the opposite poles north and south completely different to one another yet they seemed to reflect and bring out the rare pure beauty and goodness within each other. Her heart thumped and walloped around in her chest cavity as if she had just completed a marathon. Her stomach fluttered nervously at the mere sight of him looking at her like that way. ~ Ali Harper

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to
fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb
beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming,
polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches,
talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's
car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs.
The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a
peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role
model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you
got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have
guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the
worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances
here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once
things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in
Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has
been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North
Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand ha ~ Neal Stephenson

The Israelites were as shocked as the inhabitants of the city. They did not anticipate such a spectacular act of their god. Their faith was amazingly weak. But the commanders sallied forth with charges and the forces stormed the fort. They climbed over the rocky rubble and broke into the city fighting the stunned soldiers that had not been crushed in the earthquake. It would be over quickly. Caleb and Salmon swiftly made their way to the north of the city where Rahab's house was. They had prayed that hers was not a part of the wall that had collapsed. Othniel, who had distinguished himself at the battle of Jahaz by killing King Sihon, had a penchant for taking out leaders, so he led a platoon of men toward the crumbled palace walls to seek out the commander of the fort. ~ Brian Godawa

The sunbeams are welcome now. They seem like pure electricity - like friendly and recuperating lightning. Are we led to think electricity abounds only in summer, when we see in the storm-clouds as it were, the veins and ore-beds of it? I imagine it is equally abundant in winter, and more equable and better tempered. Who ever breasted a snowstorm without being excited and exhilarated, as if this meteor had come charged with latent aurorae of the North, as doubtless it has? It is like being pelted with sparks from a battery. ~ John Burroughs

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? ... The vice president has two duties: One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate .. the other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared with living a good part of time in the state of Arizona. ~ John McCain