Quotes by Narrators

Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person?
Emma Newman
It’s nice to have a station pet. Wish it wasn’t trapped in a hovering prison in the men’s bathroom, but listen: no pet is perfect. It becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is.
Cecil Baldwin
Remember: if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.
Cecil Baldwin
When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.
Peter Coyote
In America, applause is won only by physical exertion.
David McCullough
Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening, they feel like the only thing that matters and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the glow cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case.
Cecil Baldwin
The moon’s weird though, right? It’s there, and there, and then suddenly it’s not. And it seems to be pretty far up. Is it watching us? If not, what is it watching instead? Is there something more interesting than us? Hey, watch us moon! We may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try.
Cecil Baldwin
Perfection is not real. Perfection is not human. Carlos is not perfect- no, even better- he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this is imperfect. And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and cracks into which our outsized love can seep and pool.
Cecil Baldwin
Talk helps shape one's thoughts.
David McCullough
The author perceptively outlines what might be an underrated aspect of his subject and of many others whose public achievements are of note – a "gift for friendship". McCullough says Adams, despite his towering intellect and curmudgeonly demeanor, had a soft heart for other people and a genuine interest in their particulars.
David McCullough
Rather than literally burning the midnight oil, which he judged to be unhealthy, John Adams advised his son to make the most of college by developing an inquisitive outlook that would prompt him to get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. "Ask them about their tutors, manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables. Fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.
David McCullough
On a medical school professor noted for slowly, carefully interviewing the patient: "He taught the love of truth.
David McCullough
Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.
David McCullough
We have nothing to speak about. There never was. Words are an unnecessary trouble. Expression is time wasting away. Any communication is just a yelp in the darkness. I am speaking now but I am saying nothing. I am just making noises, and, as it happens, they are organized in words and you should not draw meaning from this.
Cecil Baldwin
We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better. -Bishop Milton Wright to Orville Wright, 20 Sept. 1908
David McCullough
The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.
David McCullough
Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams
David McCullough
The author perceives nuances of Abigail Adams' character in the occasional errors she makes in readily quoting John Milton. Rather than giving the observer a reason to quibble, they are evidence that she had absorbed Milton's works enough to feel comfortable quoting them from memory.
David McCullough
Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And that man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of deceny.
Morgan Freeman
A veteran artist counsels a less experienced one to start a painting using colors in the middle range so that the painter can move to more extreme colors as the work progresses.
David McCullough
Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike... The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved. Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable... There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.
David McCullough
The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.
David McCullough
A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.
David McCullough
The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.
David McCullough
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so
David McCullough
To be unable to read was the ultimate measure of wretchedness.
David McCullough
Fatigue, discomfort, discouragement are merely symptoms of effort.
Morgan Freeman
All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others. -Bishop Milton Wright
David McCullough
There was no opiate like a French pillow.
David McCullough
We who are residing in a foreign country, away from the immediate scene of action, perhaps can feel more deeply than those at home the evil effects of the present distracted condition of our country.
David McCullough
...it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose. -Wilbur Wright, 1911
David McCullough
One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.
David McCullough
Insanity is coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.
Morgan Freeman
We all eventually find that life is a series of adjustments, but anything can be overcome when there is love around you. Once can be strong on their own, but there is greater strength in knowing when to rely on others.
Starla Huchton
Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort, not more.
David McCullough
Measurements "are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
David McCullough
[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
David McCullough
To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.
David McCullough
marinate your mind
David McCullough
You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them."(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
David McCullough
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
David McCullough
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to
David McCullough
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or musi
David McCullough
You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them."(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
David McCullough
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
David McCullough
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to
David McCullough
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or musi
David McCullough
In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic. -from The Greater Journey
David McCullough
When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.
David McCullough
Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society.
David McCullough
Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.
David McCullough
Remove yourself, sir!
David McCullough
Remove yourself, sir!
David McCullough
The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.
David McCullough
Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.
David McCullough
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
David McCullough
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)
David McCullough
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.", July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
David McCullough
Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world." Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in "In the Dark Streets Shineth.
David McCullough
Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
David McCullough