Authors From The United States

"But now in the last two weeks of his stray year the little dog had added a house on another road to his nightly rounds. A house where two old people lived with a toothless, rheumatic old hound. The hound was too toothless to gnaw his bones, too old and weary with life to bury his bones. But still the old hound obeyed his dog instincts and shoved his bones under an old burlap bag against the wall of a shed where he lay during the day sunning his rheumatic joints. And the little dog knew."

"No one in that countryside really knew the dog existed. No one was sure. Still the dog had lived there for a year."

"Sometimes the haunting hunger drove the little dog out of his woodlot hiding places by day. But only when hunger became bigger than fear. Only on days when he had not been able to find a dead rabbit or crow, or hadn't been able to catch a quick, scurrying field mouse. On such days he would emerge from his shadowy woodlots. By secret avenues of hedgerow and fencerow he would whip himself across the furtive fields to still another woodlot. In the hope of finding something dead there, or of catching a mouse there. In that hope."

"Hunger haunted the dog. It sat like an agony back of his eyes. Hunger ached out of his ladder-rack ribs, those lean ribs that threatened to break through the stretched, shivering skin. Always the dog shivered. When at rest he shivered. Not from cold necessarily, but from hunger, from fear, from loneliness, and from lovelessness— mostly, perhaps, from lovelessness, for the dog had nothing but himself."

"The dog had no name. For a dog to have a name someone must have him and someone must love him, and a dog must have someone. The dog had no one, and no one had the dog. The dog had only the silent empty countryside of the few houses. The dog had only the crumbs and cleaned bones he could pick up at the few houses. The dog had only himself, so the dog had nothing, and he was afraid."

"The little hen poked her head up from the hole she had dug and looked at the crowing rooster. She thoughtfully looked from the rooster in the window sill to the high row of nests that rose against the end wall of the hen house. She started to dig again, but then she hurried through the loose straw to the nests. The time had come to lay an egg."

"The sun was out, the sun was rising in the sky. Importantly the rooster strode across the floor, hopped up to a window sill, filled his chest, and crowed a mighty crow— to crow the sun up in the sky and sunlight into his busy hen house."

"But Shadrach was a name from the Bible. And now he wasn't sure that it was right to name a rabbit with a name from the Bible. Shadrach was one of the three young men that old Nebuchadnezzar in the old testament had tossed into the fiery furnace— Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. Suddenly he thought that Shadrach must be a good black name— Shadrach must have got pretty black in that fiery furnace. He didn't smile, because it wasn't right to joke about things from the Bible, and he still didn't know whether you should name a rabbit with a name from the Bible. It worried him."

"All of a sudden he knew. Shadrach was rabbit's name. It even sounded black! He tried it on his tongue. He listened to it. Shadrach."

"And what is a week? Poof— and like that a week is gone by. Poof— there is a good week, and poof -- there it is gone. But a week doesn't go by, and doesn't go by, when you are waiting for a little black rabbit. Oh, a waiting week is long. It is like eternity."

"There was this boy, Davie, and he was going to have a rabbit. His grandfather had promised it. A real, live rabbit. A little black rabbit, if possible. In a week, if possible. And this was in the Netherlands."

"On the floor Tien Pao had held Beauty-of-the-Republic tightly against him, while with his other hand he'd twisted his cap into a prop to shove into the bullethole through which the river water came welling. He had lain on the prop to keep the water from pushing it out again, and he'd lain half over the baby sister to shield her if the airplanes and the bullets should come again."

"Back and back the planes had come with their hail of bullets, while sampans sank and went under. Back and back until there was but one empty sampan left drifting on the water. Then the planes had come no more— not for one empty sampan. It had drifted silently— empty."

"It had been a long journey. Tien Pao had lost count of all the days and nights. But all those nights when the horns of the new moon had stood dimly in the sky, Tien Pao and his father and mother had pushed the sampan on and on against the currents of the endless rivers. Day and night. There was no stopping even at night. "We won't stop until we drop," Tien Pao's father had kept saying over and over. "And we won't drop until we are far inside this great land of China. Far from the sea-for where the sea is, there the Japanese invaders are.""

"First to dream and then to do— isn't that the way to make a dream come true?"

"When I finally gathered, invented, stole, simplified, borrowed, and found a publisher for a clutch of reasonably foolproof recipes, I learned I had friends I hadn't known about—more proof that a mutual dislike can be quite as sound a basis for friendship as a mutual devotion."

"Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies. My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they needn't listen."

"If the author is so interested in Science, why doesn't she take a course in it?"

"There are worse things than being fat, and one of them is worrying about it all the time."

"When people say it's a funny thing about them, you will probably be able to control your hysterics. They are only getting ready to announce the shattering fact that they don't like something. And it's not going to be something that's really quite awful, like suttee or apartheid; it's going to be something small."

"It isn't surprising that many children consider their parents to be a little dim, and that they sometimes try to update them. The fact that they don't usually try too hard is just as well; a thoroughly updated parent is an unappetizing sight."

"The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be."

"It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism."

"Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist – someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations"

"Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the 'structures' that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change. That is, by seeing wholes we learn how to foster health. To do so, systems thinking offers a language that begins by restructuring how we think."

"Systems thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management"

"A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will clear by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved."

"We believe that, ultimately, the most important learning occurs in the context of our day-to-day life, the aspirations we pursue, the challenges we face, and the responses we bring forth."

"Mutual reflection. Open and candid conversation. Questioning of old beliefs and assumptions. Learning to let go. Awareness of how our own actions create the systemic structures that produce our problems. Developing these learning capabilities lies at the heart of profound change."

"In essence, leaders are people who "walk ahead," people genuinely committed to deep changes, in themselves and in their organizations."

"Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them."

"In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models – that is, they are responsible for learning."

""Learning organizations" [are] organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together."

"Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning."

"When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle and long-term than those of power-wielding hierarchical leaders."

"Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?"

"Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels."

"The ... problem of protection ... forced Leopold to lay his conservation cards on the table. For virtually all other species of native big game, conservationists could rationalize their efforts as a sure good, since they had no detrimental effect on the human economy. Elk, however, did damage to crops."

"Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching — even when doing the wrong thing is legal."

"I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’ … it evolves in the minds of a thinking community."

"Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

"Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’"

"An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism."

"One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance."

"In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial."

"Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago."

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."

"The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not."

"Do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species."

"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. … The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. … A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."