To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

Who hasn't wanted to die at one time or another?

All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ they aim at the same end.

Attitude determines the altitude of life.

Love isn't something you find. Love is something that finds you.

If I were like a lot of other people, then it wouldn't be fun; but since I'm like me, it's okay.

that's it - hundreds of texts and conversations, thousands upon thousands of words spoken and sent, all boiled down into a single line. is that what relationships become?

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

Resist as much as thou wilt; heaven's ways are heaven's ways.

We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again.

You can't have everything, even in California