A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.
Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.
He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.
To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.
Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.
Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.
God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
She became at once more intimate and more exalted.
Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.
Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.
One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.
Any man’s life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.
Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.
As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.
Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.
It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.
Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.
Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.
Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.
She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.
The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.
Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.
Lincoln loved other people’s jokes as much as his own.
Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.
Dominance can be a tempration to division. “There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.