People From New Hampshire

"He could not remember when he stopped hating those who were trying to kill him. After all, he was trying to kill them too. He’d abandoned hatred somewhere on the plains of Montana or the jungles of the Philippines. He wasn’t sure, but no matter, it wasn’t good to hate. It always seemed to get in the way of doing the job, always seemed to take more than it ever gave back, always seemed to get the hater killed sooner than he otherwise might have been killed."

"The old man told how he was now worthless and no good to anyone anymore because he was filled with despair, and despair was useless in times such as these. He told him to remain angry, because anger was more useful than despair and would deliver him. But to despair would surely lead to failure and tragedy."

"Though he had never smelled the death of men before, he knew the smell as if it were a knowledge born into him."

"It was in these wounded days the beginning of the man he would grow to be. He bore his pain and endured his wound as if a sign he too had been blooded by the madness that’d taken ahold of the land. He no longer shied from people, from the lone riders, from the reenslaved herded South. He no longer feared their presence on the roads and his conversion was believable to him. He had lived and did not die. He was breathing. Still, it was only the beginning and he was not old enough to know these changes, did not even know enough to think this way yet."

"He decided from that day forever after that there must live a heartless God to let such despair be visited on the earth, or as his father said, a God too tired and no longer capable of doing the work required of him."

"Tonight he was too tired to hate and hoped in the morning when he was rested he would hate again."

"Could this be what people were fighting over, the many possessions that surrounded him? These objects with so much value and so little use? He thought how the sweep of a hand or the lick of a flame and they would be broken and burned. Maybe it was the weak and the fragile and the beautiful that made you the craziest and made you fight the hardest."

"He had experienced the horror that leaves you calm and unafraid, but for her something inside was broken and he did not know if it could be mended. Her life, her horror, he could not tell."

"A person can get used to just about anything if it happens slow enough."

"Off in his head, he solved extraordinary problems of mathematics, science, medicine, the humanities. He wrote poetry, saw music. … People have told him, with your IQ you should be a genius. I was a genius and have long since abused myself into a state of average and like it better that way. Now there comes a momentary clearing, a moment of satorial splendor, and then it goes oblique. It fades away like blown dust."

"Giving is something Mr. Rogers talks about. … Mr. Rogers didn't say anything about not drinking beer before you gave blood. Asel thinks that his big day is going to hell. Not too much has worked out for him. He drinks another beer at the bar and leaves. (p. 165)"

"Under this cold moonlight he felt the shimmer of self. He felt no guilt, no pain, no remorse for what he'd done. He could have killed if he wanted to, but he did not. He felt as if he understood men, their discontent, their need to see what they'd not seen before, their need to be where they'd never been. He was one of them. He'd lived in a world of killing and blood and this world was returned to him. He'd lived in the silence and ineluctable mystery of violence. He knew the hold war had on him, the gore that would never come off in this world. He knew he could have killed Mercy's brother with his hands and it was the knowledge that gave him peace. (p. 243)"

"Of the men and women, the women were always the hardest of the band. They knew what the men knew but they also knew what the men would never know. They knew hard work and hunger, but they also knew childbirth and they knew the death of those children. They knew rape and the death of their men. They knew hatred and no one returns hate like a woman."

"On nights like this he would stop the horse and lay back and look at the stars, the haunches moving under his back. It is so like humans to think there is more out there than there is here. They are greedy for the water to be more and for the land to be more and even greedy for the sky to be more."

"Why not give up the pain, the injury, the slow and terminal? He worried and fretted how cool his skin had become. He understood how at the end a freezing man felt alive with heat and a drowned man could breathe and a burning man became cold and shivered and then died."

"Wherever you go in the world, it’s always nice to feel like you’re supposed to be there. Whether in a city or the woods, West or East, we all have someplace to be. You’ll know it when you arrive."

"Well, maybe 'tis natural. Of course things you don't know about are always nicer'n things you do, same as the pertater on 'tother side of the plate is always the biggest. But I wish I looked that way ter somebody 'way off. Wouldn't it be jest great, now, if only somebody over in India wanted ME?"

"Mrs. Snow had lived forty years, and for fifteen of those years she had been too busy wishing things were different to find much time to enjoy things as they were."

"What men and women need is encouragement. Their natural resisting powers should be strengthened, not weakened.... Instead of always harping on a man's faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold up to him his better self, his REAL self that can dare and do and win out!... The influence of a beautiful, helpful, hopeful character is contagious, and may revolutionize a whole town.... People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts. If a man feels kindly and obliging, his neighbors will feel that way, too, before long. But if he scolds and scowls and criticizes — his neighbors will return scowl for scowl, and add interest!... When you look for the bad, expecting it, you will get it. When you know you will find the good — you will get that.... Tell your son Tom you KNOW he'll be glad to fill that woodbox — then watch him start, alert and interested!"

"...this great grey pile of stone has been a house, never a home. It takes a woman's hand and heart, or a child's presence to make a home..."

"It's funny how dogs and cats know the insides of folks better than other folks do, isn't it?"

"What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars."

"No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson."

"I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!"

"Reach for it, you know. Go push yourself as far as you can."

"May your future be limited only by your dreams!"

"I Touch the Future — I Teach."

"Thus viewed, law as it exists in the modern community may be conveniently, although perhaps not comprehensively, defined as the sum total of all those rules of conduct for which there is state sanction."

"Stone ... castigated the educated elites, especially lawyers and judges, who used their skills to become “the obsequious servant of business” and in the process were “tainted with the morals and manners of the marketplace in its most anti-social manifestations.” And he warned law schools that their exclusive focus on “proficiency” overlooked “the grave danger to the public if this proficiency be directed wholly to private ends without thought of the social consequences.” He lambasted “the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served.” He called the legal profession’s service to corporation power a “sad spectacle” and attorneys who sold their souls to corporations “lawyer criminals.”"

"The horse and mule live thirty years And nothing know of wines and beers; The goat and sheep at twenty die, With never a taste of scotch or rye; The cow drinks water by the ton, And at eighteen is mostly done. Without the aid of rum or gin The dog at fifteen cashes in; The cat in milk and water soaks, And then at twelve years old it croaks; The modest, sober, bone-dry hen Lays eggs for nogs and dies at ten; All animals are strictly dry; They sinless live and swiftly die, While sinful, gleeful, rum-soaked men Survive for three score years and ten. And some of us - a mighty few - Stay pickled 'till we're ninety-two."

"Wealth, power, the struggle for ephemeral social and political prestige, which so absorb our attention and energy, are but the passing phase of every age; ninety-day wonders which pass from man’s recollection almost before the actors who have striven from them have passed from the stage. ... What is significant in the record of man’s development is none of these. It is rather those forces in society and the lives of those individuals, who have, in each generation, added something to man’s intellectual and moral attainment, that lay hold on the imagination and compel admiration and reverence in each succeeding generation."

"The law itself is on trial in every case as well as the cause before it."

"Democracy cannot survive without the guidance of a creative minority."

"Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."

"The right to participate in the choice of representatives for Congress includes, as we have said, the right to cast a ballot and to have it counted at the general election whether for the successful candidate or not."

"Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness."

"The amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered."

"The guarantees of civil liberty are but guarantees of freedom of the human mind and spirit and of reasonable freedom and opportunity to express them...The very essence of the liberty which they guarantee is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say..."

"History teaches us that there have been but few infringements of personal liberty by the state which have not been justified, as they are here, in the name of righteousness and the public good, and few which have not been directed, as they are now, at politically helpless minorities."

"There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together."

"To say that only those businesses affected with a public interest may be regulated is but another way of stating that all those businesses which may be regulated are affected with a public interest."

"Just what instrumentalities of either a state or the federal government are exempt from taxation by the other cannot be stated in terms of universal application."

"A mightier love for the Son of God, to overpower and subdue and lead captive these wayward and truant affections of the natural heart — this is what is needed."

"You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed."

"Sorrow is only one of the lower notes in the oratorio of our blessedness."

"Doctrine is the frame-work of life; it is the skeleton of truth, to be clothed and rounded out by the living graces of a holy life. It is only the lean creature whose bones become offensive."

"God's will is the very perfection of all reason."

"I was never fit to say a word to a sinner, except when I had a broken heart myself."

"Our public prayers too often consist almost entirely of passages of Scripture—not always judiciously chosen or well arranged — and common-place phrases, which have been transmitted down for ages, from one generation to another, selected and put together just as we would compose a sermon or essay, while the heart is allowed no share in the performance; so that we may more properly be said to make a prayer than to pray."

"I think that if we would, every evening, come to our Master's feet, and tell Him where we have been, what we have done, what we have said, and what were the motives by which we have been actuated, it would have a salutary effect upon our whole conduct."