Roanoke Quotes

You can't outrun what's inside of you. You can only acknowledge it, work around it, try and turn it into something better. I may not know exactly where I'm headed, but this time I'm choosing my own destiny.

Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.

The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharoahs and crazier'n a snake-fucking baby.

We're all fucked up, Lane, one way or another. It's only a matter of degree.

...the Roanoke valley where mountains hold the breath of the dead between them and lift from each morning a fresh bandage of mist.

...sometimes you have to hurt people just to prove you're alive.

No one had to explain to me the power our childhoods had over us, even when we fought like hell against them.

I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever.

Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.

I understand how sometimes you have to pass the pain around in order to survive it.

He is such a child underneath all his alpha male bravado. A selfish child who thinks everything in the whole world is meant for him.

The real danger has always lived in my granddad's kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn't force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves.

The sharp tap of hail begins against the window panes like bony fingers trying to find a way inside.

One summer is enough. Hell, sometimes one day is all it takes to change your life.

someone in a high place - the mayor, chief of police, or other official - would receive information that a neighboring city was already in flames and that carloads of armed black men were coming to attack this city. This happened in Cedar Rapids when Des Moines was allegedly in flames. It happened in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and in Fort Worth, Texas, when it was alleged that Oklahoma City was in flames and carloads were converging on those cities. It happened in Reno and other western cities, when Oakland, California, was supposed to be in flames. It happened in Roanoke when Richmond, Virginia, was supposed to be in flames.

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning "what gay clothes you wear" - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)

Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things? You may have causes, goals, interests. Are they even worth pursuing? I've long held on to a clipping from a newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia. It featured a photo of a pregnant woman who had lodged a protest against a local construction site. She worried that the sound of jackhammers was injuring her unborn child. But get this: In the photo, the woman is holding a cigarette. If she cared about her unborn child, the time she spent railing against jackhammers would have been better spent putting out that cigarette.

Henry O. Sturges, born in England, March 2nd, 1563. Landed at Roanoke, July 27th, 1587. Friend to the American Revolution, present at the Battles of Trenton and Yorktown, staunch supporter of the North in its hour of need, adviser to presidents, a decorated soldier who distinguished himself in the trenches of the Great War, and member of the Union Brotherhood—a collective of vampires dedicated to preserving the freedom of man and his dominion over the earth.

Roanoke was deep into spring—which was really pretty, even if it turned out that all the native blooms smelled like rotten meat dipped in sewer sauce (that description courtesy of Magdy, who could string together a phrase now and then).

What, then, of the liberated slaves and Indians? The saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say. None of the accounts either of Drake’s voyage or of the Roanoke colony mentions what became of them.

And there were men who worked as hard to restrict the vote as others did to expand it, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, who fought to deny the franchise to men without property, declaring, "I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality.

...his condition in Roanoke is a strong testament that lassitude, indifference and the peculiarities of his thought were primarily the consequences of his illness and not of the early attempts to treat it. The popular view that anti-psychotics were chemical straight jackets that suppressed clear thinking and voluntary activity seems not to be borne out in Nash's case. If anything, the only periods when he was relatively free of hallucinations, delusions and the erosion of will were the periods following either insulin treatment or the use of anti psychotics. In other words, rather than reducing Nash to a zombie, medication seemed to reduce zombie like behavior.

I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.

Guilt, I’m discovering, is an emotion that’s almost impossible to kill. It’s like growing, burrowing into every vulnerable spot. Always reminding you of all the ways you’ve failed.

how sometimes you have to hurt people just to prove that you’re alive.

In a windowless nook of a downtown Roanoke funeral parlor, not far from where Tess once roamed the streets, Patricia caressed the back of the scar, as if cupping a baby's head, and told her poet goodbye. It was January 2, Tess's birthday. She would have been twenty-nine. Patricia tucked the treasures of her daughter's life inside the vest--a picture of her boy and one of his cotton onesies that was Tess's favorite, some strands of Koda's hair, and a sand dollar.

You can’t outrun what’s inside of you. You can only acknowledge it, work around it, try to turn it into something better.

I knew well the painful futility of reaching for more than you were ever likely to get, how much easier it was to simply accept the limits of your world.

he could now see from the north end of the bridge. Well, good luck to you folks, Ketch thought. So, it looked like maybe the Nags Head area. But then he saw Mick turn left onto 64 West at Whalebone Junction. So it might be Roanoke Island - he hoped anyway, rather than continuing on to the mainland. Roanoke was where Kari might be today, if her mother lived in Manteo or Wanchese. He considered

Like she was walking a tightrope between light and dark, joy and sorrow, and all I could do was stand beneath with arms outstretched and hope to make a catch. Or at least that’s what I’d done with my mother when I was younger. In recent years, I was more likely to yank away the net just to watch her fall.

It is ordained,” said Burke, “in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters.

A thorough survey of Randolph’s reading defeats such an effort. The Virginian had, certainly, a lively interest in the writers of his day, but his admiration for the Romantics was strictly qualified, as his correspondence with Francis Walker Gilmer, Brockenbrough, Francis Scott Key, and Josiah Quincy shows.

No “right,” however natural it may seem, can exist unqualified in society. A man may have a right to self-defense; therefore, he may have a right to a sword; but if he is mad or wicked, and intends to do his neighbors harm, every dictate of prudence will tell us to disarm him. Rights have no being independent of circumstance and expediency.

Prudence is the foundation of all true statesmanship; in its political application, prudence is the application of principles to particular circumstances.

Having thus disposed in his merciless way of an incautious adversary, Randolph proceeded to expose the follies of seeking abstract harmony in government, of expecting the great venerable Gothic edifice of society to conform to ideal classical proportions; with Burke, he believed that a state is better governed by the irregular patterns formed by common sense and tradition than by the laws of mathematics and the Procrustean methods of omnipotent majorities.

All policy is very suspicious, says an eminent statesman, that sacrifices the interest of any part of a community to the ideal good of the whole; and those governments only are tolerable, where, by the necessary contraction of the political machine, the interests of all the parts are obliged to be protected by it....

One of the earliest known settlements of free African Americans began in 1832 when 385 men, women, and children reached Mercer County, Ohio. These former Virginia slaves, freed in the will of politician John Randolph of Roanoke, traveled by wagon and boat. The will also provided them transportation and two to four thousand acres of fertile Ohio farmland. When they arrived, the former slaves found they had been cheated out of their land by Randolph's relatives. White citizen of Piqua, Ohio held a meeting and voted to feed and provide work for the pioneers.

Like she was walking a tightrope between light and dark, joy and sorrow, and all I could do was stand beneath with arms outstretched and hope to make a catch.

On August 18, 1590, a privateering expedition on its way back to England from the Caribbean stopped off at Roanoke Island. John White, the governor of the colony and passionate advocate of the new world, took his men ashore. They found the settlement completely deserted. Infrastructure had been dismantled, no trace existed of the hundred-and-eight residents, and they couldn’t find any signs of struggle. The colonists were never found.

speaking in Roanoke, VA, at an Extraordinary Women event when a woman stepped up and started crying. “How is Ashley?” she searched my face, completely sincere.

9th New York Volunteers (Hawkins’s Zouaves) and the 21st Massachusetts in a bayonet charge on the Confederate fieldworks on Roanoke Island, by Frank Vizetelly.

In addition to settlers and supplies, Newport brought more instructions from the Company officials. The Colony was not succeeding financially, and it was urged that the Council spend more time in planning the preparation of marketable products. It was urged, too, that gold be sought more actively; that Powhatan be crowned as a recognition befitting his position; and that more effort be expended in search of the Roanoke settlers. These projects, all untimely, were emphasized, and the more pressing needs of adequate shelter and sufficient food were neglected.

America was begun on the shores of the James River, in Virginia, about twenty years after the ill-fated attempts to establish a colony on Roanoke Island and thirteen years before

When Elizabeth I ascended to the throne, her sailors were described as pirates by other nations. The English colony at Roanoke, Virginia was a base for attacks on Spanish shipping.

When my teacher asked, "Linda, where did the English first settle in North Carolina?" the question would come to me as "Lindamint, where did the Englishmaraschinocherry firstPepto-Bismol settlemustard in Northcheddarcheese Carolinacannedpeas?" My response, when I could finally say it, I experienced as "Roanoke Islandbacon." Many of the words that I heard or had to say aloud brought with them a taste- unique, consistent, and most often unrelated to the meaning of the word that had sent the taste rolling into my mouth.

For you.” Meg silenced her at last. “It’s perfectly safe for you in Boston. You’ve no idea what it would be for her. And having received a valuable education yourself since coming to Roanoke, I trust you’ll forgive us that we could never take it on your authority that our fourteen-year-old Black child would be well cared for, as she’s accustomed to being.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the English had been among the pioneers of Atlantic exploration, but during the long reign of Henry VIII (Queen Elizabeth’s father) merchants and mariners had turned away from distant horizons and focused instead on opportunities nearer to home, trading with Europe and countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Other

Early in 1583 Elizabeth granted Ralegh the use of Durham House, a “noble palace” on the Thames, formerly the London residence of the bishops of Durham.

Hariot would make a detailed record of the New World in writing, and White would undertake a series of illustrations and paintings. Together they would be Ralegh’s ears and eyes in America.

HAVING ASSEMBLED the men who would plan and take part in his expeditions to America, Ralegh’s next task was to determine where a colony should be located and what kind of settlement it would be.

It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.

You will always fail when you attempt to do God’s work in your own power,

How can science ask society to conserve that which it doesn’t fully understand? When I first began learning about red wolves, this was the question that kept coming back to me. It was intriguing enough that I decided to commit a significant amount of my time to documenting what red wolves are today; exploring how the wild population is managed; and understanding the contradictory concepts of the species’ origins, its past history in the East, and what its main conservation challenges are heading into the future. The morning after my beach stroll, I set out to meet a red wolf biologist named Ryan Nordsven. He had agreed to show me Sandy Ridge, which is a secure facility where the recovery program holds wild red wolves that are sick or being held for other reasons. A few wolves that are part of the captive breeding program are also kept there permanently. But the facility’s location is somewhat of a secret, and I was supposed to go first to the FWS’s Red Wolf Recovery Program headquarters in the small town of Manteo. Manteo is on Roanoke Island, a low and narrow, kidney-bean-shaped island wedged in the sounds between the Albemarle Peninsula and the Outer Banks. It is smothered in live oaks, and its perimeter is bordered by thick marsh grasses. From Manteo, the red wolf biologists make tracks across the whole peninsula. As I drove through the marsh and into town, my hope was that Ryan or one of the other biologists might let me tag along as they worked with the world’s only population of wild C. rufus. Little did I know then how deep Ryan and the others would ultimately take me into the secret world of red wolves.

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If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. —Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13, 2012

Other explorations had set up colonies (most infamously, the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke), but all had failed for various reasons.