The Giver Sled Quotes & Sayings

La socie te ne doit rien exiger de celui qui n'attend rien d'elle. Society should not ask anything of the person who expects nothing from society. — Sydney Samuelson

Those people who say that America is finite are some sense right. The environmental movement, for example, has a great wisdom to it: we need to protect, to preserve, to shelter as much as we need to develop. But I think this always has to be juxtaposed against the optimism of old, which is now represented in part by immigrants. I would like to see America achieve a kind of balance between optimism and tragedy, between possibility and skepticism. — Richard Rodriguez

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World. — Christopher Dawson

I'm eternally grateful to {our birth mother}, but wish I had never needed her. It's a loaded friendship, a complex connection. — Jana Wolff

When I was thirty and perhaps forty, I did not want a wife. It was too much fun being single. — Jacob Ruppert