Sarah Booth

“We are one country, and I remain a proud Unionist, happy to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and pledge allegiance, sing about the amber waves of grain, wish I was in the land of cotton, pick my teeth with a carpet tack, be in the kitchen with Dinah, hate to see the evening sun go down, take myself out to the ball game, walk that lonesome valley, and lean on the everlasting arms. I love this country. This is one of those simple dumb discoveries a man makes, like the night I came out of the New York hospital where I, a bystander at my wife’s travail, had held my naked newborn six-pound shining-eyed daughter in my two hands, and I walked around town at midnight stunned by the fact that what I had seen was utterly ordinary, everybody comes into the world pretty much like that. In the same spirit, I walk around St. Paul and think, This is a great country and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.”
― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America

“When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them a supply of water and enough nonperishable food to last several days. “Unless…” almost always marks the beginning of a wild lexical goose chase.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“It has been said that from war comes exhaustion, from exhaustion comes peace, from peace comes cooperation, from cooperation comes prosperity, from prosperity comes complacency, from complacency comes inequity, from inequity comes war.”
― Richard L Muehlberg, You are alive, so what?: A book of two hundred and twenty-two meditations collectively designed to help you lead a stronger life.

“WE DEMOCRATS are deeply flawed people, but we do stick to our guns, and believe in decency and public spiritedness and have refused to hitch our wagon to yahooism and intolerance and have supported government as a necessary force for good to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty . . .”
― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America