Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

The towering genius is not apolitical.

He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.

Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

She became at once more intimate and more exalted.

Sometimes life appears one way, but what matters is how you internalize life and its lessons.

I save every Christmas card. I keep them all.

Half the people on the internet are bored and they have no life.

Travel opens your mind as few other things do.

A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have nothing told him.

The artist is the lover of nature; therefore he is her slave and her master.

You can't mess up. If you do, everyone wants to kill you.

Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Nice girls aren't always what they seem.

I could fall for you, you know? (L)