Teresa

“Nor did I know back then that McCartney had written the song as an ode to Black women ("bird" being British slang for a pretty girl) at the pivotal moment of the civil rights struggle. That would only deepen my appreciation for "Blackbird”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“By the fall of 2021, schools across the country had lost a staggering number of teachers, paraeducators, substitutes, bus drivers, and other staff who quit, retired early, got sick, or died because of the pandemic. In September 2021, 30,000 public school teachers gave notice. Florida had 67% more teacher vacancies than the previous year. California's largest school district had five times the number of teacher vacancies as in prior years; Fort Worth, Texas, was close behind with four and a half times the number of vacancies. A small Michigan district lost a quarter of its teaching staff, while statewide there was a 44% increase in midyear teacher retirements. Lacking enough staff to operate, some schools across the country temporarily closed; hired students to serve lunch during school hours; grouped classes together in the cafeteria, where building services workers or untrained parent volunteers supervised hundreds of students; and/or asked the National Guard to fill in as bus drivers and substitute teachers.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession

“Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in the isolated villages and city slums of dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that human history is thus shaped.
(Page 281)”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“It's a bit like Spider-Man, if I may be so bold. When you have a successful book, you have the power to publish another, but the reason the book was successful in the first place creates a sense of responsibility to one's readers-they liked this, which is why I have that, and so on. There are some writers who write the same book over an over again, once a year, for decades, because their readers enjoy it and they can do it and they do it well, and that's that. And then there are some writers, like me-here Leonard smiled-who find the whole idea so utterly paralyzing that they'd rather watch Jeopardy! with their teenage daughter and just write what they want to write and not worry about anyone else ever seeing it.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow