Quotes About Impact

We're finding [texting] 11 times more powerful than email [for communicating with kids].

every man must die. I do not think about it. It is what we do in life that matters.

The fate of many men depended on the fate of this one. And this one I could help

Our actions are not simply links in a closed chain of causally connected physical events. We have the capacity to be first causes, starting a new chain of cause and effect.

Typically it takes several generations for a worldview and all its implications to thoroughly permeate a society.

To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British.

There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See.

If spanking worked, we'd only have to do it once.

Dad really had little to do with the songs, except to perform them.

He was just a sixteen-year old boy who had been killed, a kid whose photo had been in the paper, a kid who would mostly be forgotten by the time the newspaper went into the garbage-yet he was the universe, all the dying, all the crying. He was everyone who had ever died young.

My dear sister... His dear sister. Those words - how oddly they affected me

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world

Peter) Some of the most important scenes in our lives are ones we do not witness.

The knife closest to you causes more harm than the one far from you.

A child's growth is defined entirely by the adult that raises him.

The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy that land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.

It was like being part of a wave of water," she says. "A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her. When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised.

It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

Dovid thought: our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us.