Memoirists From The United States

"Though ballet is my passion and dream, it would not be entirely fair to say that it saved me, without acknowledging the human beings who played major roles in saving my life. Some of these people I loved; others I detested. But if it were not for them, I would not have a life, let alone be a ballerina."

"Her (Michaela DePrince) life was one defined by grace, purpose, and strength. Her unwavering commitment to her art, her humanitarian efforts, and her courage in overcoming unimaginable challenges will forever inspire us. She stood as a beacon of hope for many, showing that no matter the obstacles, beauty and greatness can rise from the darkest of places."

"If somebody wants to compete, I'll just pull out enough to win."

"Jeremy will be in Kutztown on Monday, September 26, debating the adult film industry with Susan Cole. We have a good relationship. We respect each other and nothing is taken personal."

"You cannot blame porn. When I was young, I used to masturbate to Gilligan's Island."

"How big are you, really? I always say that I'm two inches... from the floor."

"I had found somebody who lived a life as unconventional as my own. She above anybody would understand that monogamy had nothing to do with my feelings for her. I could go to work and have sex with countless beautiful women, and at the end of the day I'd come home to her and be as devoted as ever. And when she made porn films, it worked the same way. I would call it emotional monogamy...physical nonmonogamy."

"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success."

"My father is a physicist and to some extent, has some physicist's envy for my vocation."

"I can count how many times I used condoms on one hand. The answer is "zero". You put them on your penis, not your hand."

"He sees death in the prostitutes who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives 50 times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations."

"He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear. And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands."

"He sees death in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars."

"A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week."

"To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do."

"They'd taught him how to milk cows, and now they expected him to tame lions."

"General Lee had not been conquered in battle, but surrendered because he had no longer an army with which to give battle. What he surrendered was the skeleton, the mere ghost of the , which had been gradually worn down by the combined agencies of numbers, steam-power, railroads, mechanism, and all the resources of physical science."

"“One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” goes Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum. I obviously was not born but became black when I went to England. Similarly, of course, I was not born but became a woman of color when I went to America."

"We lived in fact, throughout our childhoods, easily and unthinkingly crossing thresholds between one place and another—Ain Shams, Zatoun, our school—places that formed their own particular and different worlds with their own particular and different underlying beliefs, ideals, assumptions."

"I not only wish them all dead but I wish them all in Hell."

"We all automatically assume that those who write and who put their knowledge down in texts have something more valuable to offer than those who simply live their knowledge and use it to inform their lives."

"Egyptians, for instance, might, with equal accuracy, define themselves as African, Nilotic, Mediterranean, Islamic, or Coptic. Or as all, or any combination of, the above. Or, of course, as Egyptian: pertaining to the land of Egypt."

"The devastation unloosed on Muslim societies in our day by fundamentalism . . . seems to be not merely the erasure of the living, oral, ethical, and human traditions of Islam but the literal destruction of and annihilation of the Muslims who are the bearers of those traditions. In Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and, alas, in Egypt, this narrow, violent variant of Islam is ravaging its way through the land."

"We haven't taken Washington, but we've scared Abe Lincoln like hell!"

"I quickly realized that Trump's actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd."

"In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump's voters who fought him the most aggressively."

"Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)"

"Even at my best, I'm a delayed explosion - I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It's not just that I've learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me."

"I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better."

"At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I'll miss him, and the example he set."

"The next time that we get power, whether it's...President Trump round two in 2024...I think the thing that we have to take away from the last ten years is that we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power."

"Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us."

"Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us."

"[On NPR, August 2016] I can't stomach Trump"

"I think this election is really having a negative effect especially on the white working class. What it’s doing is giving people an excuse to point the finger at someone else, point the finger at Mexican immigrants, or Chinese trade or the Democratic elites or whatever else."

"[Interviewed by Charlie Rose, October 2016] I'm a Never-Trump guy. I never liked him."

"I don’t think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban. I think that all you have to do is go back to the most recent Republican president and the way that George W. Bush encouraged us to think openly and supportively about our Muslim citizens. There is an element here where I think it’s not just that Trump is exploiting something but he’s also leading the white working class to a very dark place."

"President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right."

"And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy."

"What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine."

"Anger about the wars isn't the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won't reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite. Because the last time Republican voters put a member of that elite in the White House, he sent their children on a bloody misadventure."

"“Humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us,” Vance recently told The American Conservative. “And if you’re an elite white professional, working-class whites are an easy target: You don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.”"

"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?"

"Given the number of negative experiences I've had in the past few years, I can't imagine what a Black guy goes through."

"Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office."

"I think there's a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton."

"J.D. is kissing my ass. He wants my support so bad."

"I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion. Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people. I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens. I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there and there are things that are very difficult to explain. I naturally go ― when I hear about, sort of, extra natural phenomenon, that’s where I go to ― to the Christian understanding that there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there. And I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed."

"We've endorsed J.P. — right? J.D. Mandel, and he’s doing great."

"We're going to defeat Donald Trump, the career criminal and incorrigible recidivist con man and his pet chameleon. JD Vance."