Quotes from Stephen L. Carter

He was the sort of man who only wanted to be told what he already assumed was true.

Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.

My parents, like so many others in the darker nation, shared the family stories of achievement but omitted the details of racial slights and discrimination, as if the telling were subject to what the historian Jonathan Holloway describes as a "psychologically enduring editor's pencil." So for me, writing this book has been a journey of discovery

Better to wait actively than passively.

In a crisis, time was always the enemy.

The victors always think they are righteous. But then, they always seem to start a mighty unrighteous squabbling over the spoils.

I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.

The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait.

Jonathan had been around Washington long enough to know that no offer was exactly what it seemed.

Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.

Her mother, by showing her off all through childhood, had trained into her the instinct to defeat the expectations of others.

He seemed to believe that indignation was a sufficient guardian.

People seem to remember the sacrifices they made more than what the sacrifices were for.

He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst.

This isn't about your reputation. Our job right now is to make sure that there to ARE future historians.

Rumors chase the dead like flies, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are.

Love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.