John Burnham Schwartz Quotes
In 1986, when I was 21, I lived in Tokyo for four months, boarding with a Japanese family and working for an American company.
Quotes to Explore
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I have a lot of breast cancer history on my mother's side of the family.
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Walking down the street in any town or city in the world and having people look at you and start talking to you, convinced that they know you as well or better than they do members of their own family, that's just an odd phenomenon. But I mean, I wouldn't say it was a bad thing. It's an interesting thing.
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America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.
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Our family is very tight. Just like any family, we have our ups and downs, but the love is always going to be there. I try to go to my parents' house as much as I can.
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I can swear like a fishwife.
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I love to cook. I love having friends over and family. I am definitely a feeder - I feed everybody. I am jumping around the kitchen like a crazy woman.
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In the education of the American people, I am Recess.
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Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.
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My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.
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After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.
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One thing I didn't understand in life was that I had $100,000,000 in the bank and I couldn't buy happiness. I had everything: mansions, yachts, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, but I was depressed. I didn't know where I fitted in. But then I found family and friends and I learned the value of life.
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The fact of leaving one's country, one's family, one's roots, can be painful. My father had already found his place, but for us, for my mother, it was very difficult to get our bearings.
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In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.
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Some guy refuses to fight and we call that the sin, but he's standing up for what he believes in and that seems pretty damned American to me.
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Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
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The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.
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Throughout my work with family and child support organizations, one thing that has stood out to me time and again is that getting early support for a child who is struggling to cope is the best possible thing we can do to help our children as they grow up.
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My family is from the South, and I can remember all those ladies I grew up with, like my great-aunts, who had handkerchiefs. There's something sweet about them.
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If we ever head down the American path of banning certain books or turning the editorial process into one of censorship, we will risk turning teens off books and sending them elsewhere - to their X-Boxes, for instance. To the Internet. And they won't ever come back to books.
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We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.
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I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.
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Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.
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My heart's in really great shape thanks to spinning classes.
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In 1986, when I was 21, I lived in Tokyo for four months, boarding with a Japanese family and working for an American company.
