Now they saw it - its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength - and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said - by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen. But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was still only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.
Thomas Wolfe
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Not only was he ignorant, but he had not even those conditions within himself which made knowledge possible. All that there was developed of him, at present, was a fund of energy, self-esteem, hope, courage, and daring, the love of action, life, and adventure; his life was in the outward and present, not in the inward and reflective; he was a true ten-year old boy, in its healthiest and most animal perfection. What she was, the small pearl with the golden hair, with her frail and high-strung organization, her sensitive nerves, her half-spiritual fibres, her ponderings, and marvels, and dreams, her power of love, and yearning for self-devotion, our readers may, perhaps, have seen. But if ever two children, or two grown people, thus organized, are thrown into intimate relations, it follows, from the very laws of their being, that one must hurt the other, simply by being itself; one must always hunger for what the other has not to give.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
[Plant-based diet] changed my whole metabolism, and I lost 24 pounds, and I got back basically what I weighed in high school. But I did it for a different reason. I mean, I wanted to lose a little weight. But I never dreamed this would happen. I did it because, after I had this stent put in, I realized that, even though it happens quite often after you have bypass, you lose the veins, because they're thinner and weaker than arteries. The truth is that it clogged up, which means that the cholesterol was still causing buildup in my vein that was part of my bypass. And thank God I can take the stents. I don't want it to happen again. So I did all this research. And I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy, no meat ... 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up. The calcium deposit in their heart breaks up.
Bill Clinton
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging...
Ralph Waldo Emerson