Kindness

"Kindness is the power that God has given us to unlock hard hearts and subdue stubborn souls and bring them to an understanding of His purposes."

"Live in such a way, in love and kindness, that peace and prayer and thanksgiving will be in you homes together."

"It is our duty -- I should say it is our privilege as well as our duty to take sufficient time to surround our children with safeguards and to so love them and earn their love that they will be glad to listen to our advice and counsel."

- George Albert Smith -

Gatsby

"For Daisy was young, and her artificial world was pleasant, cheerful snobbery, and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes."

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They . . . smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

"His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. Somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night . . . Gatsby believed in the . . . future, that year by year recedes before us.  It alluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow, we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning. So we beat on -- boats against the current -- borne back ceaselessly into the past."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Persuasion

"Persuasion is an art that begins in charity, not in righteousness."

- Reid Buckley - Speaking in Public

The True Mind-enhancing Drug

"The true mind-enhancing drug that the generation of the 1960s and those of the decades since have been searching for is literature."

- Reid Buckley -

Fat Books

"Don't be discouraged by fat books. In every fat book, there's a little thin book trying to get out."

- Paul Zindel - The Pigman and Me

The Birds of Sadness

"You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair."

- Sharon Creech - Walk Two Moons

Trust

"Trust, and not submission, defines obedience."

- Joan W. Blox -
A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal 1830-32 (Winner of the Newbery Medal)

A Day No Pigs Would Die

"One chore done good beats two done ragged."

"Papa works all the time. He don't never rest. And worse than that, he works inside himself. I can see it on his face. Like he's been trying all his life to catch up to something. But whatever it is, it's always ahead of him, and he can't reach it."

"That's what being a man is all about, boy. It's just doing what's got to be done."

"It's hell to be poor!"

"When you're the only one to do something, it always gets done."

"Somewhere down under all that Vermont clay was my father, Haven Peck. Buried deep in the land he sweated so hard and longed to own so much. And now it owned him."

Robert Newton Peck

If Not Forgotten

"If not forgotten, not gone."

- David McCullough -