You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
—Billie Holiday, 1956
Archive
Quotes
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
—Rosa Luxemburg, 1918Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Hazel Rochman, 1995The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
—Leviticus, c. 600 BCWhen we define democracy now, it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.
—Pearl S. Buck, 1941Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt, 1819Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
—Joan Didion, 2005Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.
—George Gershwin, 1933Do not fear the clatter of wheels, the bumps and slops in corridors. It is only turbulence.
—Romalyn Ante, 2020The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue.
—Margot Asquith, 1922The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BCEvery memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater.
—Anthony Doerr, 2006Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920