Robertson James Quotes

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.

[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.

But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh yes, this is a very fine country.

Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.

The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.

for what is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?

You must not suppose that I would like you to profess religion without possessing it. A hypocrite is in my opinion one of the most detestable of beings. my opinion is, that every one should honestly and carefully investigate the Bible; and if he can believe it to be the word of God, to follow its teachings." - Brevet Major Thomas J. Jackson (1 March 1851)

This is the hard lesson of my life: love is not in us from the beginning, like an instinct; love is no more original to human beings than sin. Like sin, it must be learned.

Are you New World or Old?' 'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.' 'Never read him.' 'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.

3Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Hell wasn't looking into her eyes, it was looking out of them. Being trapped inside, looking for an exit; not even doing that, just wandering empty rooms in bewilderment.

That's what I think more and more. There's nothing. No God, no Devil, nothing. No damnation, no redemption. There's just us and what we do. The things we achieve or the mess we make.

I never savoured life for what it was: I only wanted to get to the next stage of it. I wish now I'd taken a little more time, but it is too late for such regrets. I was like the child in the cinema whose chief anticipation lies not in the film but in wondering what he will do after it is over; I was the reader who hurries through a 500-page novel not to see what will happen but simply to get to the end.

I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.

The Federals "all cheer as one man...The Rebels cheer like a lot of school boys, every man for himself.

26“Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.

But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh yes, this is a very fine country.

Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Every thing is familiar, and everything is strange. It's as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal.

Claudia Roden, and Paula Wolfert (Mediterranean), Diana Kennedy and Maricel Presilla (Mexico), Andy Ricker and David Thompson (Thailand), Andrea Nguyen and Charles Phan (Vietnam). For general cooking: James Beard, April Bloomfield, Marion Cunningham, Suzanne Goin, Edna Lewis, Deborah Madison, Cal Peternell, David Tanis, Alice Waters, The Canal House, and The Joy of Cooking. For inspiring writing about food and cooking: Tamar Adler, Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Patience Gray, Jane Grigson, and Nigel Slater. For baking: Josey Baker, Flo Braker, Dorie Greenspan, David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich, Elisabeth Prueitt, Claire Ptak, Chad Robertson, and Lindsey Shere.

Finally, in late May or early June our breathlessly anticipated gilt-edged invitation to the July 29 wedding arrived. Soon after, we received a silver-edged card inviting us to a private formal ball at Buckingham Palace two nights before the wedding. We had been expecting the first invitation but were totally surprised by the second one. For both invitations, we had to reply to the Lord Chamberlain, Saint James’s Palace, London, SW1. For the wedding, dress was specified as: Uniform, Morning Dress or Lounge Suit. For the ball, dress was: Uniform or Evening Dress. Tiaras Optional. We had no idea what a “lounge suit” was, nor did I have a tiara handy—fortunately tiaras were optional. Help!

a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.

Robertson began one lecture with the definition of a sign: “a thing that gives notice of something different from itself.” He next gave examples of natural signs, such as smiling, which indicates joy, and blushing, which speaks of shame. Then, after observing that such signs are universal, Robertson noted this exception: “Politicians and other cunning men of business, [who] by great and refined dissimulation, have in great measure confounded and stifled the natural indications of their inmost thoughts.”28

One of the reasons Kay laughs so much now is because in the beginning, when Phil was drinking and they didn’t have much money, there wasn’t a lot of laughing going on. But now we laugh at almost everything together. On our birthdays, Kay likes to send us very random cards, like Earth Day or graduation cards. Her favorite thing to do at Christmas is to give us gag gifts. After we’ve exchanged gifts as a family, she’ll give everybody a joke gift. Kay will often forget why she thought it was funny when she bought it. She’ll give someone salt and pepper shakers and won’t even remember why she gave them! Of course, Kay’s gift always say they’re from her dogs. If you get a present from her rat terriers-or some random famous person whose name is on the tag-you know it’s actually one of Kay’s gag gifts. Every one of Kay’s rat terriers has been named Jesse James or some version of his name, because if one dies she’ll still have another one with her. Somehow, that helps her cope with the trauma of losing one of her pets. She’s had like twenty of those dogs and they’ve all been named Jesse, JJ, or Jesse James II. She calls one of her dogs Bo-Bo, but his real name is Jesse James.

8For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light

I have walked and run through this world pretending emotions rather than feeling them. Oh, I could feel pain, physical pain, but I had to imagine joy, sorrow, anger. As for love, I didn't know what it meant. But I learned early to keep myself well disguised.

I think back on how cold I was, even then. It is hard to recall, now that I burn with this dry, feverish fire, but cold I certainly was. There was ice built around my heart, years of it. How could it have been otherwise?

At the end of June, we had to move from our flat. Exxon had extended my husband’s assignment for another six months and the landlord wanted a huge rent increase that the company would not cover. At the beginning of July, we moved to 11 Eaton Mews South, a small carriage house I had found. The house was owned by an American expatriate, Jud James, who had installed new appliances and cleaned all the curtains and carpets for us--a considerable improvement over the flat. Jud was proud of the fact that earlier on he had leased his house for a while to Richard Leakey, the famous anthropologist. I wonder how Jud felt when the young nanny in his house became engaged to the Prince of Wales.

If you think yourself into the past, that's where you'll end up - and faster than you expect.

Korie: When I was a student at Ouachita Christian School, my senior-year Bible teacher, David Matthews, adopted a little five-year-old boy. In class that year, we talked a lot about how important it was for Christians families to adopt and that children should never be left without a home and loving parents. The idea always stuck with me. James 1:27 says: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” When we were dating, like most couples, Willie and I talked about how many kids we wanted to have. I told Willie about my desire to adopt and he was all for it. We both grew up with big families so we decided we wanted to have four kids, with at least one of them through adoption. We never knew how that would happen. We didn’t know if we would adopt a boy or a girl or a newborn baby or older child. We decided we would remain open, and if God wanted it to happen, it would happen. There were several families at White’s Ferry Road Church that adopted children, including one couple that had adopted biracial twins. Their lawyer came to them and asked if they were interested in adopting another biracial child who was about to be born. They told her they couldn’t do it at the time, but they remembered that we had expressed an interest in adopting a child. Their lawyer called Willie and me and told us how difficult it was to place biracial children in homes in the South. We were shocked. It was the twenty-first century. We committed to being a part of changing that in our society. Skin color should not make a difference.

25“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

We don’t notice when it shows up across the street or quietly takes up residence in our classrooms. And we just don’t take its proponents at their word. Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and any number of other leaders of the Christian Right have told us that they abhor our public schools, and that they pray for the day when such schools cease to exist.

The woman could smell cigarette smoke in a hurricane.

Dad and I were mixing with a new set of people who had not known much, if anything, about my father. If they had even heard of Dad before he came on the pro-life scene in the mid-to-late seventies, they probably hadn’t liked the sound of him. These people included Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, James Kennedy, and all the rest of the televangelists, radio hosts, and other self-appointed “Christian leaders” who were bursting on the scene in the 1970s and early ’80s. Compared

How much of a conscious goal do you think that is at the upper levels of organizing with, say, somebody like Rod Parsley? I think they’re completely conscious of it. The level of manipulation is quite sophisticated. These people understand the medium of television, they understand the despair and brokenness of the people they appeal to, and how to manipulate them both for personal and financial gain. I look at these figures, and I would certainly throw James Dobson in there, or Pat Robertson, as really dark figures.

Jack the Ripper, I’ll burn bright as a light. Burn out the darkness like a single lantern in sight. One message of fear, one message of hope, which Jack will outlast is the question provoked.

Returning to Jamaica, he had the sense of re-entering a place much less likely to alter in the coming years. Year in, year out, the cane fields produced their riches, the gangs swung their way through them, slaves were brought, seasoned, used up, replaced. Planters would go on making improvements to their great houses, to methods of production, and yes, to the conditions in which their slaves lived and worked, because it was in their interest to do so. But fundamentally the structure of life and of society did not change.

Literature that grows from a particular place or culture contains a set of identifying markers, and one of its functions is to articulate - in voices we recognise as our own - hope and complaint, gratitude and intent, praise and criticism; to speak of what unites us and what divides us, of love and loss, of truth and principle.

This was Scotland in 1950: coast to coast Jock Tamson's bairns stood or sat, lugs cocked to the wireless for news from home and abroad, from Borlanslogie, from Korea, or tuned in for The McFlannels on a Saturday night, or It's All Yours on a Monday with young Jimmy Logan doing the daft laddie Sammy Dreep, sluttering 'Sausages is the boys!' This was Scotland in 1950: land of 250 pits and 80,000 colliers, 100,000 farmworkers and four universities: land of Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, the Saxone Shoe Company in Kilmarnock, Cox Brothers jute mills in Dundee and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, every town and city and every part of every city with it own industries and hard-won skills... This was the land of Leyland Tiger buses from Thurso to Dalbeattie, and double-deckers crowding the city trams towards oblivion, or grandiose department stores and miserable slums, tearooms and single-ends, savage sectarianism and gloomy gentility, no-quarter football and stultifying Sundays.

And if it taks tanks and bullets and mass arrests to convince the people what’s good for them, can it be aw that good for them?

Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of its people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. The are confused. For generations a kind of balance has been maintained. There has been give and take, and, yes, there have been arguments about how much give and how much take, but now something has changed. There is a sense of injustice, of neglect, of the real operation. Nobody is being shot, there are no political prisoners, there is very little censorship, but still that sense persists: this is wrong. It grows. It demands to be addressed. The situation needs to be fixed.

You’d escaped because everybody else was hell-bent on wanting everything and you saw it wasn’t going to work….. It wasn’t the age of small nations as you thought, it was the age of money and waste and garbage and pollution and destruction and it was all going to get worse,….

All stories are lies, Mike. The secret is to work out how big the light is. That’s why we keep believing in a thing called truth. It doesn’t exist but we can’t help looking for it. It’s one of the most endearing of human failings.

What fortunate is that! To live in this beautiful country and be old and healthy and be with someone you love and respect every minute of the day, every day of the week. What fortune is that!

They were ashamed of it, or at least they didn’t think we should have it. The future was English. My grandad is dead no, but last year I went to my granny and said to her, in Gaelic, why did you hide it from us? And when she realised how much I could speak she started crying. She said they’d thought it was for the best. Gaelic would handicap us. But now I speak nothing but Gaelic to her and she loves it. I’m learning loads from her. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m getting close.

The things that have been put in place in the last five years – National Insurance, pensions, the Health Service – these were changes for the good, they made ordinary people’s lives better, safer, happier and longer. Any government that tried to undo them, Don believed, would risk the wrath of the people.

Only the land will remain. People dug it and cut it and burned it and built on it but the land remained. ‘It is we who must reconcile ourselves to the stones, not the stones to us.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you. 1 Peter 1:3, 4 NIV

The Royal Commission had the added advantage that it would take years to come to any conclusion and any conclusion it came to would probably be inconclusive.

People think we didn't have theatres in Scotland for centuries because the Church suppressed them. Well, perhaps. But you could also argue that we had theatres in every town and village in the land: they were called kirks, and every week folk packed in to see a one-man show about life, death and the universe.

Everybody has a still, sheer place in them where light doesn’t penetrate. It

Miss Pearson was suspicious of volunteers since they usually had ideas above their station, but she also knew Ellen to be her most precocious pupil and that it was better to lift the lid off her occasionally than have her bouncing like a steamy pudding at her desk,

I’m not sure. That’s the point. There’s a tyranny about beginnings and endings and the routes between them but we seem to like being tyrannised. And I’ve been wondering if I could do it differently.

All over the city there was hypocrisy, and irony, and heroism: fabulous views from despoiled viewpoints, squalor and refinement propping each other up, dissolution in progress behind impregnable façades, and dreams of glory in crumbling tenements.

he smoked Woodbines ferociously, right down to the nip, and his thumb and forefinger were yellow and hard where the tobacco burned them.

With each generation there is less contact – real, physical touch – with the tools, the materials, even the products of its labour.

The way you’re already penalised if you don’t pay your gas bill by direct debit, or the way they give you a discount if you’re rich enough to pay your house insurance in a oner. The world we fought for, Don thinks bitterly, and then, as he always does now, he shrugs it off. Not his problem.