Lance Morrow > Quotes

“Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.”
― Lance Morrow, The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons

“People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.”
― Lance Morrow

“Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by the power of horrific images.”
― Lance Morrow

“A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage. What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury.”
― Lance Morrow

“America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness...”
― Lance Morrow

“I used to think that the great American themes--the binaries--were Success and Failure. Now I think that, more deeply, the themes are Innocence and Guilt.”
― Lance Morrow, The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism

“But these being glove-gray country mice that have skittered in from a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon, I root for their innocence and ingenuity. I am even mouse-proud. My mice arc smarter than your mice! After the stunt with the Skippy peanut butter jar, I felt as if they had gotten 8oos on their SATs. These guys arc good.”
― Lance Morrow, Second Drafts of History: Essays