Steven

“Invoking John Winthrop, Reagan said, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.” It was a free, proud city, built on a strong foundation, full of commerce and creativity, he said, adding, “If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Whatever his faults, Ronald Reagan believed in the possibilities of a country that was forever reinventing itself. “And how stands the city on this winter night?” Reagan asked. “More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago…. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“he’d have to improve significantly to achieve mediocrity.”
― Richard Russo, Chances Are . . .

“His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one God-head, as in Christianity, but of two-a sick fuck and an evil genius.”
― Philip Roth-Nemesis

“What you can’t afford to lose is precisely what the world robs you of. How it knew what you needed the most, just so it could deny you that very thing, was a question for philosophers. Answer it and you’d have the kind of book Tom Ford would’ve considered worth writing: urgent and new and absolutely necessary. To write it, though, you’d have to be on fire.”
― Richard Russo, Chances Are . . .