Quotes About Opportunity

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn't even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population.

each opportunity for escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal, that this savage new reality could not hold.

He'd broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

Entrepreneur?" Pepper said the last part like manure. "That's just a hustler who pays taxes.

Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the white boys he served with, but the uniform meant different things depending who wore it. What was the point of a no-interest loan when a white bank won't let you step inside?

another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.

He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

it was time to get out of what Coach called small-stack mentality. I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down.

That was a temporary setback," Zippo said. "If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a 'setback.

Every state is different,' Lumbly was saying. 'Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you'll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.

I suppose I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. the key is in the door and it can always be opened.

All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.

I guess I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. The key is in the door and it can always be opened.

The men all seemed to want mulligans with their lives.

The U.S. government decided it would become the world sheriff. No one forced it to take on the role. Yet ever since it strapped on its six-guns, the actions of its senior deputies have trivialized the process by rewarding recalcitrance. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act was an extraordinary opportunity to promote actions that could save the lives and health of many women and girls. That opportunity has been largely squandered.

The great thing about real life is that it belongs to you. You can make it up as you go along!

In my next lifetime I wanted to come back as a guy. They seemed to always get the upper hand.

In this city, the rich had some room, and the middle class had less, and the poor had none.

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity.

There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. In other words, life's meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.