Episcopalians From The United States

"Frances Perkins brings to the Cabinet as Secretary of Labor the many years of training and experience which step by step have rounded out the preparation for her great responsibility. Even with the contribution of her vivid personality, the press, generally speaking, pays her the tribute of reporting the wisdom of the words and acts rather than idle "gossip" about the "first woman Cabinet member.""

"One of the girls who was among my best friends came from a poverty-stricken home. Her family was delightful and I used to wonder how such things could happen..."

"Perkins' personality informed all her work. ...[W]hat Perkins chose to do was determined by her religion. Many Democrats supported the because it attracted votes; others, for humanitarian reasons; Perkins, "for Jesus' sake," because it brought the City of God closer to the cities of toil and industry."

"I'm the last leaf on the New Deal tree, and I think perhaps I've clung here too long already."

"Despite hate mail and harsh treatment by the press, her husband's chronic mental illness, and a resolution of impeachment against her, Frances Perkins successfully fought to make life better for working people by establishing unemployment insurance, minimum wages, maximum hours, safety regulations, and Social Security."

"[Upon accepting] Truman's appointment [to the] three-member Civil Service Commission (CSC)... For six and a half years Perkins prodded the government to be more efficient, to cut down on red tape and to simplify rules and regulations."

"I am extraordinarily the product of my grandmother... Scarcely a week goes by that I don't find myself saying, "As my grandmother used to say," and then repeating something that apparently has been a guiding principle all my life."

"For Perkins being religious meant that she had a "duty" to help people. She agreed with the words of , the founder of Mount Holyoke, that people "should live for God and do something.""

"Perkins was graduated in June 1902. It was the year... that a record number of immigrants came to America... For two years, Perkins had various teaching jobs close to home. Then in 1904 she went to teach... a... girl's school in Lake Forrest, Illinois. Whenever she had free time she went into nearby Chicago... She... spent time at ... and ... two of America's most famous settlement houses... in the slums where well-educated people... settled to share poor people's lives and help them improve their situation."

"Perkins was influenced by many books that exposed horrendous situations, including 's book How the Other Half Lives, an exposé... that "deeply moved" Perkins."

"What she liked about [Theodore Roosevelt] were his "progressive ideas," or his ideas that everybody should get a "square deal"... not just big business owners. ...Roosevelt thought it was time for reforms—time to put some limits on big business, to drive out corrupt politicians, to provide better opportunities for working people, and to improve conditions in the cities. ..."Out of the period ...a whole generation ...emerged... who had a great passion for social justice," Perkins said years later."

"At and , Perkins was immersed in the lives of people who wore ragged clothes, lived crowded together in rickety buildings, suffered from malnutrition and disease, and were paid what amounted to pennies for the hours they worked. ...Before long, Perkins decided to leave teaching... [d]etermined to be a social worker... [T]he Philadelphia Research and Protective Association ...formed ...to investigate ...pimps, thieves, and unscrupulous employers... preying upon newly arrived immigrant girls and black women from the South. Perkins applied, was hired, and moved... in 1907... She uncovered a variety of abuses and devised programs to help... young women. She lobbied officials to get regulations and legislation passed. ...[S]he gave speeches to inform people and raise money..."

"[A]lthough the astonishing growth of industry in America was amazing, it was also awful. Amazing with such inventions as the telephone (1876, four years before Frances... was born); the phonograph (1877...) the electric light (1879...); and the first airplane (1903, one year after Perkins graduated from college). But awful with rich business owners... and poor workers living in... city slums. ...Awful with dangerous working conditions in most mines, factories, and sweatshops. ...Perkins started her junior year at Mount Holyoke in 1900. ...Bathtubs were found in one out of seven American homes. ...Big businesses were thriving, and businessmen had enormous financial and political power."

"During her senior year Frances... heard speak. ...[K]nown as a "raging furnace" about issues of social justice, Kelley had successfully fought to get [Illinois] laws passed... to prohibit child labor and to limit the number of hours that women worked. According to Perkins, Kelley's speech "first opened my mind to... the work which became my vocation.""

"What is the trouble? How can we cure this? ...What can be done? ...I had to do something about unnecessary hazards to life, unnecessary poverty. It was sort of up to me. This feeling... sprang out of a period of great philosophical confusion which overtakes all young people..."

"[I] wrote to anybody I knew who had any connection at all with charities to say I wanted a job, but had no experience."

"['s speech] first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of the work which became my vocation."

"I discovered for the first time, under the stimulus of that course and of that teacher, that I had a mind... My intellectual pride was aroused and the grim determination awakened me to get the most I could out of college."

"[T]he idea of social work and social workers was very new. Determined to learn what was known, Perkins took night courses from Professor ... famous for his idea of "surplus civilization," or belief that with industrialization there would be enough... for every person to have a decent life. "I just lapped it up there," Perkins said later..."

"If facts were to be found, I was to devise ways to prevent it or overcome it either by social representation or by legislation at the municipal or state level. ...Ten cent lodging houses, employment agencies, the offices of the Philadelphia political "gangs," and the two police courts all became my haunts..."

"Frances Perkins's name and the dates of her birth and death are carved on her headstone. So are the words:Secretary of Labor of U.S.A. 1933-1945"

"Social work was an infant then. ...I just lapped it up there... I discovered... that I had a mind that starts, operates on its own scheme, inquires, penetrates, goes to the bottom of things, puts two and two together and comes to some logical conclusions that have authority."

"Like many young people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt... Out of the period that I was in school a whole generation, particularly women emerged, but men too, who had a great passion for social justice..."

"During her lifetime, a time when women faced severe restrictions and prejudices, Frances Perkins achieved many firsts—first woman head of an industrial commission, first woman in a governor's cabinet, first woman in a president's cabinet. But never without public furor."

"The Department has noted with considerable apprehension increasing propaganda rumors and semi-official statements in favor of an autonomous Macedonia emanating from Bulgaria, but also from Yugoslav partisan and other sources with the implication that Greek territory would be included in the projected State. This Government considers talk of "Macedonian Nation", "Macedonian Fatherland", or "Macedonian National Consciousness" to be unjustified demagoguery representing no ethnic or political reality, and sees in its present revival a possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece."

"Jennifer Lee, who wrote, and co-directed Frozen with Chris Buck, has chosen her next project: A Wrinkle in Time. Lee will write the bigscreen adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book for Disney in which children travel through time and visit strange worlds in order to find their missing scientist father. Published in 1962, “Wrinkle in Time” was one of Lee’s favorite novels as a child, and she impressed Disney executives with her take on the project, which emphasizes a strong female-driven narrative and creatively approaches the science fiction and world-building elements of the book."

"Henneberger: If the Bible is not literally true, does that mean we don’t need to take it seriously? L'Engle: Oh no, you do, because it’s truth, not fact, and you have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts."

"I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write."

"Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you.""

"I sometimes think God is a s--t — and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s--t."

"I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing.""

"I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can."

"A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened."

"It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.... I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah... Faith is best expressed in story."

"I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it."

"One day back in the fifties my father and I were watching a program on our black and white TV which included an interview with an elderly man who answered one question by remarking, "Just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean the fire's gone out in the furnace." The screen went black as the program went off the air, and we heard the announcer say, "There will be a brief interlude of organ music." Certainly that mild quip of the elderly man wouldn't shock anybody today. We might laugh appreciatively at his wit, but that would be the extent of our reaction. The change in point of view has been equally radical in the world of books. Somehow or other I've never gotten around to reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, but I doubt if it would shock me."

"Wrinkle, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male? Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years. Someone said, "It's all been done before." Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice."

"Language is often changed by writers. We speak English today because Chaucer chose to write in the language of the common people, rather than the Latin or French used by those who were educated. James Joyce had an almost equally profound effect on language when he wrote about the inner self, rather than the outer self."

"A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations. What!?! It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad. Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil. Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision. Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us." And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word."

"I don't want to dump on TV, but there's no doubt that our language has been changed by television, especially by the media, which tries to manipulate us into being consumers. Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers. What does the consumer think? What does the consumer want? How ugly. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes. I want us to be nourishers. To be a librarian, particularly a librarian for young adults, is to be a nourisher, to share stories, offer books full of new ideas. We live in a world which has changed radically in the last half century, and story helps us to understand and live creatively with change. The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not."

"I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn't get along together, and what made people tick. That's why I started to write stories."

"Life is full of questions, and we are free to ask them, to understand, occasionally, that we are not going to get an answer, or at least not the answer we expect, and then we are called to move on. But I believe that God encourages us to ask questions."

"We are not to retreat from life, pinning our hopes on ‘elsewhere.’ but to know that we will come to that final destination best by living full here and now, be it through joy, or pain, or a mix of both."

"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."

"The truth of a story is what the novelist strives for, and quite often the writer is taken down strange and unexpected paths on this search."

"Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light."

"Faith is for the part of the story that superficially isn’t believable."

"In Kenneth Grahame's beautiful book, The Wind In The Willows, Mole and Rat go to the holy island of the great god, Pan. It is a superb piece of religious writing, but because it has gone beyond fact, it is deeply upsetting and untruthful to some people. If a story is not specified as being Christian, it is not Christian. But that is not so. I think that this scene is upsetting because it calls us beyond fact into the vast world of imagination, and imagination is a word of many dimensions."

"There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate."

"If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends"