Memoirists From The United States

"I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?"

"When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you."

"All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?"

"The oaks and maples outside the window of his room are wild men with their heads on fire. He shuts his eyes, but the view inside his eyelids is the same nightmare. His nerves are lancinating cables under his skin that send jolts of electricity to his muscles. He is so tremulous that when he brings a glass of water to his lips, he has spilled most of it before he can take a sip. He pukes his insides out, till he imagines the lining of his stomach is smooth and shiny like a copper pot. But the impulse to run is gone. He has put one or perhaps two oceans between him and the place he flees."

"Ghosh sighed. "I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your own slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only your actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.""

"Maybe it was written on my face that I'd become aware of human complexity - that's a kinder word than "deceit"."

"Hyrum took a horse, and went immediately to Father Johnson's, for Joseph. He arrived there in the afterpart of the night, and having aroused Joseph, he said, "You must go straight with me to Kirtland; we are having terrible times there, and I want you to come up and see to things.""

"Joseph being informed of the precise situation of affairs, he got a horse of Father Johnson, and started without delay, with Hyrum, for Kirtland. On his arrival there, the brethren were collected for meeting. Joseph went upon the stand, and informed the brethren that they were under a great mistake, that the church had not transgressed; "And, as for the keys of the kingdom," said he, "I, myself, hold the keys of this last dispensation, and will for ever hold them, both in time and in eternity; so set your hearts at rest upon that point, all is right.""

"He then went on and preached a comforting discourse, after which he appointed a council to sit the next day, by which Sidney was tried, for having lied in the name of the Lord. In this council Joseph told him he must suffer for what he had done, that he should be delivered over to the buffetings of Satan, who would handle him as one man handleth another, that the less priesthood he had the better it would be for him, and that it would be well for him to give up his license."

"Hyrum was vexed at this frivolous nonsense, and, taking his hat, he went out of the house, saying, "I'll put a stop to this fuss, pretty quick; I'm going for Joseph." "Oh, don't," said Sister Howe, "for pity's sake, don't go for him. Brother Sidney says the keys of the kingdom are taken from us, and where is the use of bringing Joseph here.""

"Oh! no," said Mr. Smith, "I hope not."

"I tell you they are," rejoined Elder Rigdon, "and no man or woman shall put up a prayer in this place to-day."

"This counsel Sidney complied with, yet he had to suffer for his folly, for, according to his own account, he was dragged out of bed by the Devil, three times in one night, by his heels. Whether this be true or not, one thing is certain, his contrition of soul was as great as a man could well live through."

"This greatly disturbed the minds of many sisters, and some brethren. The brethren stared and turned pale, and the sisters cried, Sister Howe, in particular, was very much terrified; "Oh, dear me!" said she, "what shall we do? what shall we do? The keys of the kingdom are taken from us, and what shall we do? .... I tell you again," said Sidney, with much feeling, "the keys of the kingdom are taken from you, and you never will have them again until you build me a new house.""

"Sidney Rigdon went immediately to Kirtland, but Joseph remained at Father Johnson's to finish his preparations for a journey, which he contemplated making to Missouri. Immediately after Sidney's arrival at Kirtland, we met for the purpose of holding a prayer-meeting, and, as Sidney had not been with us for some time, we hoped to hear from him upon this occasion. We waited a long time before he made his appearance; at last he came in, seemingly much agitated. He did not go to the stand, but began to pace back and forth through the house. My husband said, "Brother Sidney, we would like to hear a discourse from you to-day." Brother Rigdon replied, in a tone of excitement, "The keys of the kingdom are rent from the church, and there shall not be a prayer put up in this house this day.""

"After he had sufficiently humbled himself, he received another license; but the old one was retained, and is now in the hands of Bishop Whitney."

"Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?"

"... How we treat the least of out brethren, how we treat the peasant suffering with volvulus, that's the measure of this country. Not our fighter planes or tanks, or how big the Emperor's palace happens to be ..."

"A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth."

"Encouraged by the old surgical saw "Any idiot can amputate a led," Ghosh had decided to proceed. If he hesitated, it was because the rest of the saying went "but it takes a skilled surgeon to save one.""

"Bromidic though it may sound, some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn."

"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

"It's a sad day at 60 Minutes and for everybody here at CBS News. It's hard to imagine not having Andy around. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much."

"I want to live my next life backwards: You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day. Then you get kicked out for being too healthy. Enjoy your retirement and collect your pension. Then when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You get ready for High School: drink alcohol, party, and you're generally promiscuous. Then you go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have no responsibilities. Then you become a baby, and then... You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, in spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then... You finish off as an orgasm."

"There's nobody like Andy, and there never will be. He'll hate hearing this, but he's an American original."

"Ive had quite a few complaints lately from people who like it when I complain about things. They say I havent complained about anything lately. So tonight, for you complaint fans, I have a complaint."

"Democrats believe people are basically good but must be saved from themselves by their government. Republicans believe people are basically bad but they'll be okay if they're left alone."

"The one affectation I have forced on the publisher … are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter."

"At the end of every television broadcast, the names of the people who worked on it are listed. Why, you may ask yourself sometimes, would so many people want to take credit for such a bad show? Well, its just like what's happened to the dollar. Credits in television suffer from inflation. There are more of them and they arent worth what they used to be, even on a good show."

"Some banks get stuck with a name that sounded good a hundred years ago when they were founded but sounds kind of silly now. In New York, there's a Dime Savings Bank. Once you pass forty, a dime isn't worth bending over to pick up if you drop one. You certainly wouldn't bother to take it to a bank to save it."

"President Reagan must be happy over how bad the weather's been this winter, because its the one thing no one's blaming on him. Theres nothing television news likes better than bad weather, and we sure get a lot of it in the United States."

"I wish people who sell things would stop trying to guess how many of something we want to buy. I want to buy things one at a time."

"I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht."

"We are the new extremists, armed with a vision to see through the charade imposed upon us by the gatekeepers of consensus reality, who manage a mass hallucination we choose to reject."

"Extremist art is non-metaphysical, based on the senses."

"In an empirical sense, extremist art is a unified confirmation of one’s resistance to and transcendence of status quo thinking."

"Today’s smut is tomorrow’s fine art. The profane, with the passage of time becomes sacred. Having suffered under a reactionary ontological hermeneutics for the last fifty years, the extremist movement constitutes an emergent phenomenon which is more than the sum of the processes from which it has emerged. Interpretation theory rewarded by dominant culture would have us believe that history is objective when in fact its subjective nature is based on hierarchical systems of exploitation benefiting a global elite."

"Now that contemporary art, a system that stands for privilege, nepotism and political connections is finally dying, get out of the fucking way."

"The Simulation imposed upon us by shadow governments and hidden elites must be exposed and destroyed. That includes a cancerous art establishment based on commerce and the malignant dictums of predatory capitalism that negates individual breakthroughs based on lived experience."

"It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility.""

"Quite often I feel forced to write against the stereotype. As much as you would like to ignore the stereotype, saying it's totally irrelevant, actually you can't. It impinges on your life a lot, it impacts on your work, and I know that quite often I write against the stereotype and I react against the stereotype. One stereotype of Asian Americans is that we're really serious, and we never have any fun, and we have no sense of humor. When Shirley MacLaine made an early trip to China and then she came back with a documentary, one of the things she said on the documentary was that "they have no sense of humor," and "we told all these jokes and they didn't laugh." I think I might overemphasize showing how Chinese and Chinese Americans are the most raucous people: they laugh so much, they're telling jokes, and they're always standing up and performing for one another. They're so outgoing. And so in China Men and in Tripmaster Monkey I really go overboard to emphasize that part of the character. I also think that being able to laugh and to be funny-those are really important human characteristics, and when we say that people don't have those characteristics, then we deny them their humanity."

"The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends."

"[About George McGovern] He is a spiritually evolved political leader."

"In a call with reporters hosted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation on Tuesday, board member John Cusack expressed his umbrage with the media’s “character assassination” of Edward Snowden and neglect of The Real Issues. “Why are the red and blue elites in the establishment press so afraid of an informed public?” he asked rhetorically. “Why do they keep changing the subject?” “Have the establishment media been so co-opted by government access that they’ve lost all sense of proportionality?”"

"(Reuters) - Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional. Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and still faces U.S. espionage charges, said on Twitter that the ruling was a vindication of his decision to go public with evidence of the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping operation."

"To me Snowden is a hero because he revealed secrets that we should all know, that the United States has repeatedly violated the fourth amendment. He should be welcomed and offered asylum. But he has no place to hide because every country is intimidated by the United States."

"I suggest... we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers 'stood down' ever see their jobs again? Will artificial intelligence consume freedoms that have been suspended? As Edward Snowden says, the disease of mass surveillance will outlast this pandemic."

"We are open, respectful of the right to asylum, and it is clear that if circumstances permit it, we would receive Snowden with pleasure and give him asylum here in Nicaragua."

"[Snowden]'s done a great service, because he's telling the truth and this is what we are starved for. The American people are starved for the truth. And when you have a dictatorship or an authoritarian government, truth becomes treasonous. For somebody to tell the American people the truth is a heroic effort."

"WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run."