Teresa

“Sixty years after the memories of the changes and upheavals of the Sixties have begun to fade, been half-forgotten or become misunderstood, my project with Dick might add our voices … to the task of restoring a “living history” of that decade, allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made, what chances were lost, and what light might be cast on our own fractured time. Too often, memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.
(Pages 404-405)”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“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

“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

“Writing a memoir is akin to taking off one's clothes in public, and as I learned years ago in the amateur strip contest as Darren and the go-go boys cheered me on, success at such an endeavor can only happen when you've got a lot of people pulling for you.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World