Quotes from Jeanne Marie Laskas

A person can't just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.

Bob Dole is not a bitter man. That part is jarring. His life was hard.

Mike Webster's death was significant. Iron Mike. The best center in the NFL. Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. Four Super Bowl rings. He had played in more games - 220 of them - than any other player in Steelers history.

In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere.

The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can't keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.

'The melancholy of all things done' is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.

Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.

All peace-loving women shut up when they sense they have stepped onto Guy Turf. Guy Turf is a murky realm of ego and pride and chivalry and testosterone and heroism.

A coal mine greets you with only one sentiment, then hammers it: 'This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people'.

The 'modern' air-traffic-control system, and the FAA itself, was created in the aftermath of one of the most dramatic commercial midair bashes, way back in 1956.

Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bored pretty girl would survive the rigorous life of a Ben-Gal. The Ben-Gals all have jobs or school or both.

You can make your life so much larger simply be acknowledging everyone else's.

Lately, in this city I love, this neighborhood I love, all I seem to notice are the intrusions. Hot Air. Reeking garbage. Lunatic neighbors...I am inventing filters. Air filters. Stinking garbage filters. Lunatic-neighbor filters... Sometimes I imagine plugging a big air conditioner to the front of my head so I can block the rest of the world out. That's not right.

It says the American people are full of goodness and wisdom, and you just have to be paying attention. And sometimes that's hard to do when you're inside this bubble, but this was a little portal through which I could remind myself of that every day. The letters are beautiful, aren't they? -Obama

If I'm going to be working out here in a place that at least feels like the middle of nowhere, I'm going to need access to the outside world. It's important to have access. Solitude is one thing, but you could turn into the Unabomber if you don't have some connection to people.

The neighbor's flock has taken advantage of the chaos, and I think that's pretty smart.

I do think there's a mind-set—no matter how much we may want to deny it in this country—about the perception of blackness. And sometimes it's a subconscious mind-set. Where anything associated with blackness has a negative connotation. This mind-set has a very fundamental assumption. A false assumption that black people cannot be intelligent. I

Just because politicians, scientists, and business execs are raging about it, and newspaper headlines are screaming it, doesn't mean the message sticks—or that people care. It takes more than that to change a culture. In

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

The league lied. They had the evidence and chose to ignore it. They had the evidence at least since 2005, when one unlikely scientist, a man from nowhere who would not go away, who would not back down, found proof.

Extreme corruption steals our dignity from us as human beings and degrades us to the level of animals,

What happens in stories is what happens in stories: the telling and retelling simplify and reduce. History gets written in the wind that keeps blowing; if it's not too strong you don't even notice it. The lights are bright and there's so much shouting and scrambling.

long braids, used Ivory soap, and liked to stencil her walls with

That love was God's love. Where do you think love comes from? It comes from God, and it comes through other people." I think about this. Usually I walk around thinking of love as a kind of gravity. Just one of those laws of nature, a force that has its way with you. I don't tend to wonder where the law might have come from.