Heartland Book Quotes

So you gonna actually do some work today or should I just tell Mama you’re headin’ on back to Pretty Boy Town?

And maybe on the first day of school I’ll tell the guidance counselor I want to go to college after all so I can major in wishful thinking.

Old books, the kind that give off the smell of dust and decay, an odor Balastair associates with the scent of pure knowledge. Knowledge of new things. Knowledge of new places. Every book a doorway—a cabinet of curiosities opening to a new land.

The roots were really strong. So no matter what happens to the outside, it can still thrive. If the really important parts are buried deep enough, isn’t really much that can destroy them.

I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap.

That’s what love is. You put the other person’s happiness before your own. Even if it hurts like hell.

As Adam Winkler aptly describes it in his terrific book Gun Fight, “few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization” that aimed to confiscate any guns that free blacks may have obtained during and after the Civil War and thereby “achieve complete black disarmament.

Growing up, I figured God must really love farmers. Just look at how often sowing and reaping are mentioned in the Bible! Over and over again the Good Book references barns overflowing, bringing in the harvest, and casting seed on fertile ground. It does take incredible faith to be in a profession where so much is out of your control.

It’s not always possible to find the right words but we can still be part of the conversation. We can walk with people for a bit, sit with them, hear them.

One of the West's singular migrations--from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley--is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read...

We are 'tribals,' Yadeen and me from the Thak heartland, and Hulak, from the grass country north of Jindazhen," she told him. "We use the magic taught by our tribes and academic magic. Book magic. The masters who sneer are too blind to realize the gods and the immortals use no books. They think tribal magic is on the same level as hedge-witchery. They will mock you and do their best to shut you out of their oh-so-learned circles if you admit to taking other magics seriously. Lindhall is all right, and your other teachers. But be careful around the likes of Chioké and Girisunika. If you want to move up in Carthak, you stay clean of the stain of tribal magic.

This book consists not only of my stories of mistakes, rather it’s all our stories of mistakes and heart aches. It’s the plight of all of us who were rebelling, and kicking against the social messes we found ourselves in. Yet there are so many others who are not alive today, and I feel obligated in not allowing the lessons of their mistakes to lie in the grave with them. It was the United States Senator, Al Franken, who stated, “Mistakes are a part of being human. Precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.” I’m revealing all of those mistakes and more, sadly a lot of them are fatal. In an attempt to have these real life lessons obtained in blood, prevent the blood-shedding of so many others. These stories are ones that young people can understand and identify with. While at the same time empowering them, to make better decisions about their choice of friends, the proper use of their time and how one wrong move can be fatal. I guess the major question that we all have to ask ourselves at the end of the day would be: how could I and so many others have been prevented from becoming monsters? You be the judge. I now extend my hand to you, and personally invite you to take a journey with me into the heartlands of innocence to menacing, from a youngster to a monster, and the making of a predator. I will safely walk you down the deserted and darkened street corners which were once my world of crime, gang violence and senseless murders. It’s a different world unto itself, one which could only be observed up close by invitation only. Together we will learn the motivation behind hard-core gangsters, and explore the minds of cold-blooded murderers. You will discover the way they think about their own lives, and why they are so remorseless about the taking of another’s life. So, if you will, please journey with me as we discover together how the fight of our lives were wrapped up in our fathers.

It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.

The book is limited in time and space to addressing population policies in the Young Turk era (1913–50) in Eastern Turkey. It begins with the Young Turk seizure of power in the 1913 coup d’état and ends with the end of Young Turk rule in 1950.1 It will describe how Eastern Turkey as an ethnically heterogeneous imperial shatter zone was subjected to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at transforming the region into an ethnically homogeneous space to be included into the Turkish nation state. How was Eastern Turkey moulded by Young Turk population policies? Why was the Turkish process of nation formation so violent in this region? Why do political elites launch policies to increase homogeneity in their societies? These will be the guiding questions in this book. The focus will be on an account of the implementation of these nationalist population policies in the eastern provinces, in order to discuss the policies in detail. This book argues that the Young Turk nationalist elite launched this process of societal transformation in order to establish and sustain a Turkish nation state. In this process, ethnically heterogeneous borderland regions were subjected to more encompassing and more violent forms of population policies than the core regions. The eastern provinces were one of these special regions. This book highlights the role played by the Young Turks in the identification of the population of the eastern provinces as an object of knowledge, management, and radical change. It details the emergence of a wide range of new technologies of population policies, including physical destruction, deportation, forced assimilation, and memory politics, which converged in an attempt to increase population homogeneity within the nation state. The common denominator to which these phenomena can be reduced is the main theme of population policies. The dominant paradigms in the historiography of the great dynastic land empires can be characterized as a nationalist paradigm and a statist paradigm. According to the first paradigm, the phenomenon of nationalism led to the dissolution of the empires. Centrifugal nationalism nibbled at the imperial system for several decades until the empire crumbled into nation states. Due to their relatively early acquaintance with nationalism, the main force behind this nationalist disintegration was often located among minority groups such as Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, and Armenians. In this interpretation, the Young Turks too, were a nationalist movement that reacted to minority nationalisms by pushing for the establishment of a Turkish state in the Ottoman Anatolian heartland. In 1923, they succeeded when a unitary Turkish nation state rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

Fireworks went off around them as they both fell headfirst in love for the first time ever.

Heartland Cheer, the next book in A Heartland

She suspected he was the most dangerous kind of storm there was. The kind you couldn’t see coming in time to take cover. The kind of storm that left you wary of blue skies and sunny days.

Get over here.” Kyle reached for Coop, pretending to go in for a hug before landing a backhand right between his legs. “Still want a hug?

Good with your hands, works well with others, always gets up, and never quits.

I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you,” he said between kisses. His words burned into her heart, imprinting themselves onto her soul—where she planned to keep them forever.

If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school's desk you'll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food.

In his book The Territories of Science and Religion, the scholar Peter Harrison examines the origins of the idea that science and religion must be diametrically opposed. He points to the thirteenth century religious figure Thomas Aquinas, speculating: 'Aquinas...may have said something like this. Science is an intellectual habit; religion, like the other virtues, is a moral habit.' This position feels lost to me in the way we talk about religion in the marketplace of ideas now. Somehow, the idea that God created the world became more important than our connection to God, and then it became important to discredit God. And in intellectual circles, God became stupid, and science became smart, and the being stupid and smart did not go together.

I think of the self-proclaimed agrarian farmer and scholar Victor Davis Hanson who in his book Fields Without Dreams, wrote sneeringly but also with grief: 'They [city people] no longer care where or how they get their food, as long as it is firm, fresh, and cheap. They have no interest in preventing the urbanization of their farmland as long as parks, Little League fields and an occasional bike lane are left amid the concrete, stucco, and asphalt. They have no need of someone who they are not, who reminds them of their past and not their future. Their romanticism for the farmer is just that, an artificial and quite transient appreciation of his rough-cut visage against the horizon the stuff of a wine commercial, cigarette ad, or impromptu rock concert.' People in the cities don't see farmers clearly. The farmers are overlooked, and instead of being seen as recognizably real, the farmer is romanticized.

Until she pulled up at The Ridge and her headlights caught the silhouette of a tall brooding boy she’d just sworn she was done with.

I was living on Earth, where everything anyone needs pops out of replicators. Lack of professional credentials isn’t really a big issue in the heartland of the Federation the way it is in other places, after all.

Many people--whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue--like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it's an anomaly in the United States, almost a foreign entity. This book offers an alternative view: that beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where America began.

She cannot describe for me precisely what she means, but I assume she thinks that the extra time we’ve spent reading and writing has affected Michael, Juston, and me; we are the three who have gone to college. We have been forever altered by books. We will ask questions, and in doing so, we allow an uncharted world to form in our heads. Our world is not so much a place in which problems are fixed, but one in which doors are left open and we live with the uncertainty of what we do not know. We will revisit the open doors day after day, and we share the open doors with one another.