Tag: quotation

Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.

Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.

Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.

Many are linking today to David Frum’s excellent piece “This is Trump’s Fault” in The Atlantic. For those who might skip the long read, here are the final paragraphs. 

We are getting to that time where the numbers are going to peak and it is not going to be a good-looking situation.

Donald Trump, incompetent fool and President of the United States, at today’s press briefing. Because appearances are all that matter. 

Fortitude is one of those words I knew was important when I first learned it, but that took time to understand, to practice, to be made a quality. The word is defined as “courage in pain or adversity.” This is one of the most beautiful definitions of a word not beautiful. I believe adversity can breed brilliance beyond what those with safe and comfortable lives are capable of.

Tommy Orange, in “Escape Velocity,” an essay in Esquire (October 2019) on the life of 17-year old Jeffrey Martinez, a young man of the Sicangu and Oglala Lakota living in Oakland, California. 

The ocean ends, like life and vision, at a horizon that is the fault of the curvature of the eye and earth, with no proof of true end at all. The ocean seems indefinite. It presents the eye with a line that is an illusion. We linger on its shores or live on its surfaces, but never have a means of encompassing the whole. … A single drop is as endless as all. The world is the world regardless of where you stand. … Water offers to us our own reflection, but not as a mirror does. We see our own face on the surface of the water, but we see through our face the depths below.

Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary, 2008.

If one cannot identify the native plants in a particular landscape―and almost any name will do―the plants tend to blur into one another and become a confused and confusing mass of vegetation, or bushes. In other words, if you can’t name it, you can’t really see it. In this lies the magic of names and naming. To name a thing is to give it a second creation, a creation by the viewer.

in Going Back to Bisbee by Richard Shelton, 1992.

Friendship confirms existence―and in the most generous of ways. Against harm’s haunting insistence that any given self is the world unto himself―that all that is real is judged to be so by the mind perceiving the real, to the horrific point that even the self thinking the world is but the idea of the self thinking the world―friendship says, “he is and I am and it is.” Friendship answers skepticism with a peculiar and intimate faith: my friend is as real as me. The stakes of the world are the world. It is dangerous because it is real. One must find a friend to sail with upon the ocean. Only friends can face the awful risk that is living, and the awful wonder. One looks at his friend with the world in his eye. It is not “mine.” The friend knows the world is always and ever, irretrievable, maddeningly, lovingly, longingly “ours.”

A Whaler’s Dictionary, Dan Beachy-Quick, 2008

Good sex is better than bad sex. Bad sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than bad sex. Self-sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than self-sex. Sad sex is always far worse than good sex, bad sex, self-sex, and no sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

Julian Barnes, in The Only Story, 2018.