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“In our finest hours...the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.”
Collected by Mr. Brad Cole
"You didn't need my name to threaten me and drag me from my home. And you thought that made me unworthy, instead of you."
Collected by Ms. Arko
"The Wise stand out,
because they see themselves as part of the Whole.
They shine,
because they don't want to impress.
They achieve great things,
because they don't look for recognition.
Their wisdom is contained in what they are,
not their opinions.
They refuse to argue,
so no one argues with them."
-Lao Tzu
Collected by Ms. Titus
'"But twenty-seven years behind bars can utterly change a person. As the years passed, Mandela realized what scientists would later show: nonviolent resistance is a lot more useful than violence. Take the recent work of Erica Chenoweth, an American sociologist who started out believing the ‘Mandela Method’ was naive. In the real world, she thought, power is exercised through the barrel of a gun. To prove it, she created a huge database of resistance movements going back to 1900.
‘Then I ran the numbers,’ she wrote in 2014. ‘I was shocked.’ More than 50 percent of the nonviolent campaigns were successful, as opposed to 26 percent of the militant ones. The primary reason, Chenoweth established, is that more people join nonviolent campaigns. On average, over eleven times more. And not just guys with too much testosterone, but also women and children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Regimes just aren’t equipped to withstand such multitudes. That’s how good overpowers evil–by outnumbering it.
In nonviolent campaigns, one ingredient is essential: self-control. While in prison, Mandela became a master at keeping a cool head. He decided to study his enemy, reading scores of books about the Afrikaners’ culture and history. He watched rugby. He learned their language. ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands,’ Mandela explained, ‘that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’
Mandela tried to make his fellow inmates see that their guards were people, too, only that they’d been poisoned by the system. Years later, that’s how Mandela would look at Constand Viljoen: as an honest, loyal, and brave man who’d spent his life fighting for a regime, he believed in...
Mandela’s superpower lay elsewhere. What made him one of the greatest leaders in world history, observes journalist John Carlin, is that ‘he chose to see good in people who ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have judged to have been beyond redemption"' (Bregman 344).
Collected by Mrs. Shelly Lute
“Then with a start, you realize that the book you were holding, the red plaid cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite black jeans and the favorite maroon socks with an almost-hole in one heel, the living room, the about-to-whistle tea kettle in the kitchen: all of these have vanished.”
Collected by Mr. Murdick
"The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination."
Collected by Mr. Bill Welch
"The low thudding of the drums continues as Sara and I eat dinner, lifting into the air with the rising moon --- a theatrical score, heightening our anxiety."
Collected by Mr. Persse
"This book is written out of the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures (referring to Native American) are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. It is written with the understanding that our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else's."
Collected by Mr. Persse
“There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves.”
Collected by Mr. Mulligan.
"Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bead so smooth; no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface...nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum."
Collected by Ms. Stutzman
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to the house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet. The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
Collected by Ms. Pearson
Then he heard the whistle again, clear and high. Danny felt a chill in spite of the fire's heat. He hurried on. The water was thick and dark from the burning. Where the draw straightened, Danny stopped. Perhaps fifty years ahead, a small, dark-skinned man stood beside the blackened water. His face was turned toward Danny with his head cocked at an odd angle, as if he were listening. In his hands, he held a shiny plate.
"This way!" Danny shouted. "The fire's moving downhill. Run this way!" He waved at the man. A stand of brushy junipers covered the steep bank above the man, and their tops formed a kind of canopy over him. As Danny watched, the junipers began to burn, their long needles dropping like fiery rain.
Collected by Mr. Lippert
All of a sudden it felt sweet. He braked the gray hackle yellow and let it float down like a tiny helicopter auto-rotating, deflecting just the tiniest bit as it hit the air current immediately about the water's surface. For one instant, the fly settled on the race and poised; then suddenly the race itself exploded into a burst of fish-flung spray. Powering upwards from the hidden depths, the giant brook trout slashed at the fly and carried on upwards into the air.
Collected by Mr. Wright
"A sign that read WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH dangled from one hinge, creaking in the wind. The big tyrannosaur robot was upended and lay with it's legs in the air, it's tubing and metal innards exposed. Outside, through the glass, they saw rows of palm trees, shadowy shapes in the fog."
Collected by Ms. Jordan McNeill
"If we can have compassion for ourselves, and acknowledge how we feel afraid, hurt, or threatened, we can have compassion for others- possibly even for those who have evoked our anger."
Collected by Ms. Jordan McNeill
"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."
Collected by Ms. Jordan McNeill
“He could still see them on that dingy porch, a backdrop to a borrowed sign. Like driftwood, they just kept floating back.”
Collected by Mr. Murdick
“We were watching the telly when we decided to rob the dentist.”
Collected by Mr. Murdick
“A gloved hand broke the surface and thrashed in the air, struggling for something to grasp on to.”
Collected by Mr. Murdick
“It was a bad scream, a full-throated, seen a ghost hysterical scream, which silenced all conversation. Shadow looked around, certain somebody was being murdered, then he realized that all the faces in the bar were turning toward him.”
Collected by Mr. Murdick
“Adults talk about how kids' brains aren't fully developed and we're like bulletproof sociopaths or something, but that's no true, at least not for me. Most of us just have a hard time putting things into words.”
Collected by Mr. Murdick
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