"There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't."

“It was stunning actually, because what you would hope for from our national leaders is some reflection, some understanding that the situation that we encountered in Iraq was not what we expected, that it was not what he said it would be.”

“Elections themselves do not necessarily lead to more corporate uncertainty - quite the reverse, stable democracies create a reliable environment. And elections have caused hardly any change in the basic economic framework in the last few decades.”

“We lost one child and we gained ten thousand children.”

“Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.”

Source : George Fitzhugh, Hinton Rowan Helper (1960). “Ante-bellum writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on slavery”

“The difference between a good and great officer is about ten seconds.”

“I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.”

“It has been said that if you aim at nothing in life, you are likely to hit nothing! I have never had anyone come to me and say, 'Venita, I plan to fail.' Yet I have observed many who failed to plan and who unfortunately met with the same dismal results.”

Source : Venita VanCaspel (1988). “Money Dynamics for the 1990s”, Simon & Schuster

“I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend years and years fine-tuning, revising, editing, etc. What inspires me? Who knows. I am not inspired that much. That’s why I write long form fiction—I am not much of a short story writer. Ideas come seldom, but when a good one comes, I really stick to it and see it out. I’m a problem-solver—I've never thrown out an entire manuscript; I've always forced myself to repair it until it was a lovable thing again.”

Source : "Beyond Diaspora: Porochista Khakpour". Interview with Roxanne Naseem Rashedi, lareviewofbooks.org. February 17, 2013.