To argue without knowledge is like trying to weave without thread.
But Anatole said suddenly, 'Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.' 'What are you telling me?' 'I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.
Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.
My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.
The state dinner is almost a formula, but you try to make it interesting. You try not to overload it with too many political types. You try to get a cross section.
You try to do something every single day that will help an American or maybe someone overseas.
Often people say they can't base their strategies on customers because customers make unreasonable requests and because customers vary too much. Such opinions reveal serious misconceptions. The truly outside-in company definitely does not try to serve all the needs of its customers. Instead, its managers are clear about what their organization can and should do for customers, and whatever they do they do well. They focus.
If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy.
Here's the beauty of a camera: you don't have to come up with words for what you're looking at... Maybe another angle is needed sometimes. When we're burned out from writing, we can photograph or draw, look at the world in a different way, and photographers could try writing what they see.
Mostly I try to be the best example of me that I can be.
You always face a bunch of hands trying to stop you from working.
I think it's very hard for a woman to be treated as a person and not just as a woman who tries to become a politician.
I try to make it a rule not to meddle in other people's politics.
My guiding principle as president has been to try to do the right thing even when it's not politically convenient.
We can be civil to each other, and we can try to express ourselves acknowledging that we're all patriots, we're all Americans, and not assume the absolute worst in people's motives.
We shouldn't assume that government is always trying to do the wrong thing.
Try to be as honest as possible.
We have to have better intelligence. We have to have better interdiction capabilities. And so the issue is not how much we spend or how hard we try; the issue is are we doing it the right way? Are we being smart about it?
If Democrats are not showing up in those [rural] places even if you're not gonna win right away but if you're not in there at least making an argument that, "Hey, you know what? It's the Democrats who are trying to raise your minimum wage."
I remember having meetings with Republican senators who initially had been trying to engage [Obamacare] but saw that the politics of 'no' were growing inside the Republican Party.
If you hear what people had to say about Abraham Lincoln or what they had to say about FDR, or what they had to say about Ronald Reagan when he first came in and was trying to change our approach to government, that elicited huge responses.
Rather, my perceptions about how we solve problems in health care or education span across a whole range of areas. And I want to try to capture that complexity.
With the world's unprecedented inspections and access to Iran's program, we'll know if Iran ever tries to break out.
