Women From The United States

"These are weighty secrets, and we must whisper them."

"The Autumn seems to cry for thee, Best lover of the Autumn-days!"

"The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning."

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s Presence, Which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite."

""I saw myself entering a cave in a rock formation on a bleak, windswept seacoast. The entrance to the cave was low, and the cave was quite deep. All I found in it was a very old and large parchment scroll. Its ends were rolled around heavy, gold-tipped poles, the two sides touching at the scroll's center and tied together by a strip of parchment that fell away as my fingers touched it. I untied the ends and opened the scroll just enough to expose the center panel, on which only two words were written; 'God is', and nothing else. …"As with the subway experience several years earlier, an aspect of the cave experience likewise found its way into the Course. The workbook states: "We say 'God is', and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless" (W-pi. 169.5:4)."

"I am a very careless person in some ways, I lose everything. But I never lost anything of this Course. People would would stop me in the subway and say, “Miss, you forgot your something or other, and hand it back to me.” Taxis would honk their horns, you know and say, “You left something in the back seat.” My secretary would say, “Are you sure this belongs in this case report, it doesn't sound right?” It was impossible to lose this Course, and I tried. But it...followed me around in an odd kind of way. People would send it back to me, anything. And I always got it back. We never lost anything, which is incredible."

"There’s nothing that I would call ordinary audition about this at all. It doesn’t really.. It’s a curious thing that will be very difficult to explain. Somebody asked me, “Was it as though your hand was moving?” No. I wrote perfectly voluntarily in response to…I call it a voice, but “a voice” has sounds...or sounds as though it has something to do with hearing. And I didn’t hear anything. I think it’s the sort of hearing that you can’t really describe. It doesn’t have anything to do with ears, or waves hitting a drum or anything on that order. I don’t really know, I think maybe I’m using the wrong word when I say “hear.” I sort of recognized it, it was very rapid, I could even....if I didn’t catch a phrase, I could sort of say, “Would you mind doing that again?”"

"O power of Love, O wondrous mystery! How is my dark illumined by thy light, That maketh morning of my gloomy night, Setting my soul from Sorrow's bondage free With swift-sent revelation! Yea, I see Beyond the limitation of my sight And senses, comprehending now, aright, Today's proportion to eternity. Through thee, my faith in God is made me sure, My searching eyes have pierced the misty veil; The pain and anguish which stern Sorrow brings Through thee become more easy to endure. Love-strong I mount, and heaven's high summit scale; Through thee, my soul has spread her folded wings."

"In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?"

"Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise — when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter."

"I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity."

"We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?"

"In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?"

"Dottie West (born Dorothy Marie Marsh; October 11, 1932 – September 4, 1991) was an American country music singer and songwriter. Along with her friends and fellow recording artists Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, she is considered one of the genre's most influential and groundbreaking female artists."

"You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to put me there...It's been tough, but that's alright. I am the oldest of ten kids and I am a survivor. I love this business so much, that there's no way I could think of retiring. When I'm 87, I'll still be walking on the Grand Ole Opry and singing "Here comes more tears to cry...". I still don't feel that I have the biggest record yet, or sang it the best. I think the best is yet to come, and that's the truth!"

"I know how to make money and I'll make it."

"I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live."

"I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people."

"Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy."

"I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene."

"In person, Grandma Moses charmed wherever she went. A tiny, lively woman with mischievous gray eyes and a quick wit, she could be sharp-tongued with a sycophant and stern with an errant grandchild."

"There emanates from her paintings a light-hearted optimism; the world she shows us is beautiful and it is good. You feel at home in all these pictures, and you know their meaning. The unrest and the neurotic insecurity of the present day make us inclined to enjoy the simple and affirmative outlook of Grandma Moses."

"The death of Grandma Moses removed a beloved figure from American life. The directness and vividness of her paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of the American scene. Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall its roots in the countryside and on the frontier. All Americans mourn her loss."

"I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones, and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them. I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I am satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be."

"If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens."

"A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells."

"We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice."

"But more overt sexual aggression may be the product of something few will acknowledge, at least on the record: Resentment. Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they've been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they're not."

"Reality, after all, is what civilization attempts to mitigate."

""The court is watching," she pointed out. "I thought you wanted me more exposed to the public eye?" he teased. "I reverse myself," she said coldly, "and argue for a little circumspection." She tugged at his hand, but he didn't release her. She gave up, unwilling to be seen trying to pull away. "You don't think I can do it." She didn't think he could. "I don't care what they think." She knew that. It worried her. "No," said the queen, but she wavered. He sensed it and smiled. "Am I king?" he asked, irrepressibly. It was the one argument she was in no position to deny. She wanted him to be king, and he was resisting it with all his will."

"If a man who claims to see the future is a fool, how much more so, the man who believes he can control it? We think we steer the ship of fate, but all of us are guided by unseen stars."

"In my experience, the more you know of the gods, the more you know what you cannot understand."

"Eschewing ceremony, Eugenides said, "You shot their ambassador?" "You gave me the gun," protested Sounis. "I didn't mean for you to shoot an ambassador with it!" Eugenides told him. "Oh, how our carefully laid plans go astray," murmured the magus. "You shut up!" said Gen, laughing."

""Ten thousand!" I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. "That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!" When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and the Baron Xorcheus among them. They thought it was how a king behaved."

"Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, "Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?" With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down. When none did, I smiled again. "We will have to assume the gods are on my side." "I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot." "I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, thought it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus." They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous."

"In the shocked aftermath, I said, "We'll give them a second chance." With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom of the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia's ruthless advice, and I had failed. Gen's fit reassured me that I had not failed for lack of trying. He had seen no other solution himself. I lifted out the matching gun and read the archaic inscription. Realisa onum. Not "The queen made me," but "I make the king.""

"Do you warn him not to offend the gods?" "There was no need," said Attolis, smiling, "He couldn't offend the gods with a pointed stick."

"You have heard the queen's advice. My gift is below. Would you wait to see it until you have decided what you will do with hers?"

"Inside the case was a dueling pistol, a king's weapon, wheel-locked, chased in gold. Eddis had seen it earlier that day. When Sounis lifted it out and tipped his head over the locking mechanism, she knew he was reading the letters inscribed there: Onea realia. "The queen made me.""

"I seem to remember once sharing my oatmeal with you," Sounis remarked. "I seem to remember stealing your oatmeal," said the former Thief of Eddis, "but it didn't have sand in it." "Sand?" said Sounis, taken aback. "Sand, and if my queen notices, she will have someone flayed."

""When you stop fussing," Gen had said, slipping to his knees beside her couch, "I will sleep with two knives under my pillow." Attolia had looked down at him and said sharply, "Don't be ridiculous." Only when Eugenides laughed had Sounis realized her implication: If she ever turned against Eugenides, a second knife wouldn't save him."

""I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite." Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy."

"You bastard," said Sounis wearily. "I don't know why I don't stab you here in this alley so I can be the annux over Sounis and Attolia." They were twisting through the narrowest of passages, with Eugenides still in the lead, turning on what seemed to be a whim from one walkway to the next. "Well, the stabbing would be unkind," said Eugenides, "but you can have the annux part with my goodwill." "Not Attolia's." "True," said the king. "Better not stab me."

"Don't you trust my palace security?" "Yes, of course," Sounis said, trying to think of some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard Eugenides laugh. "My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts. Don't be embarrassed." :"Gen, what are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?" Sounis asked. "Going out of my mind," said Eugenides promptly. "At least I am on the verge of going out of my mind."

""Sophos, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I'm hurt." "I'm sorry," said Sounis, blinking, afraid that he had made contact with his wild swing. "I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would you?" "Gen, it's the middle of the night." "I know," said the king of Attolia."

"Eddis nodded. "Gen leaves the reins in Attolia's hands. Which is not what either I or Attolia recommended, but wisely he ignored us both." "Wisely?" Smiling, Eddis said, "He hasn't the temperament. He gets angry. She only ever gets angry at him." Sounis, having seen the Thief of Eddis lose his temper, could see her point."

"Would I be wrong," Sounis asked one evening as he walked with Eddis, "to think that I talk to you, you talk to Gen, and Gen talks to Attolia, who talks to the magus, who talks to me?" Eddis laughed. "Not always. Sometimes, as in this case, someone approaches my Eddisian ambassador Ornon, here in Attolia, and he talks to me, I talk to you, you talk to Attolia, Attolia talks to Gen, and he talks to me." "I see you appear in that progression twice." "Oh, more than that, because after Gen talks to me, the process reverses. He goes back to Attolia, who talks to you, who go to the magus, who repeats the information to me, who gives it to Ornon, who takes it back to whoever started this particular political ball rolling in the first place."

"Then, as you well know, Eugenides looked me in the eye as if I were a complete stranger and said, "The simplest way to end a war is to admit you have lost it." The silence after that was not polite."

"The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted it was Eugenides's choice and his desire as well, but it was impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would grow more like his wife, or his wife like her king."