Alex Schaefer

“There was something so marvelously innocent, so irretrievably lost, about the world back then. You could see it in the easy, confident gait and sun-drenched smiles of the vacationers in every photograph. These people were happy. I don’t mean they were happy. They were happy. They were living at a good time in a lucky country and they knew it. They had good jobs, good homes, good families, good prospects, good vacations in cheerful, sunny places.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“The Americans of 1801 had more gadgets, better weapons, a superior knowledge of geography, and other advantages over the ancients, but they could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

“Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Glitter and Glue

“They get on with it. Even after imagining all this fineness—the girls (check), Edward (check)—I bawled, stuck on the awful thought that the reason I’d ended up in Ellen Tanner’s house, the reason no one had hired me as a waitress or bartender, the reason I’d been fired by Eugenia Brown and answered an ad from a widower, was so I could see how a family goes on, so I could witness their suffering, their slow but indisputable survival.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Glitter and Glue