One Great Moment

“…you can’t write about this stuff and be boring. That would be a sin against God.”

Why is it great? I read Allison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina” when it was first published, about the time I was covering a range of social justice issues – gender,…
June 6, 2018
Jacqui Banaszynski

“Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

—Pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson
April 25, 2018

“sweet spring is your time is my time is our time for springtime is lovetime and viva sweet love”

Why is it great? You know how it seems like spring will never arrive, you wait and you wait, and it’s dreary and cold, and then suddenly, in one day,…
April 18, 2018
Kari Howard

“The Sun specializes in short items unlikely to tax the mental capacities of its target audience: one-paragraph news articles, one-sentence paragraphs, one-word sentences.”

Why is it great? Well, first of all, it comes from the great Sarah Lyall, who was the longtime London correspondent for The New York Times. She has such a…
April 11, 2018
Kari Howard

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

Why is it so great? When I was looking for a One Great Sentence dealing with immigration, I was struck by the differences between America’s two presidents named Roosevelt. In…
April 4, 2018
Kari Howard

“I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I said.”

Why is it so great? I found this quote from the absolutely amazing Ida B. Wells after The New York Times righted an old wrong by publishing her obit —…
March 28, 2018
Kari Howard

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy.”

This 1961 book has haunted me since I first read it about 15 years ago. Written at the birth of suburbia, and the accompanying conformity of such neighborhoods, it tells…
March 21, 2018
Kari Howard

“If I were hauling 600 miles across the Arctic, I’d choose J. for stamina and his uncomplaining nature … “

“If I were hauling 600 miles across the Arctic, I’d choose J. for stamina and his uncomplaining nature; A. for her medical skills and ability to play music; N. because…
March 14, 2018
Julia Shipley

“The American people want someone to articulate their rage for them.”

Why is it so great? I recently watched the movie “Network” again, and it could have been written in 2018 instead of more than 40 years earlier. This line almost…
March 7, 2018
Kari Howard

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Why is it so great? The writing in this famous passage is so good that George Orwell wrote a parody of it designed to ridicule the bloated writing of his day:“Objective…
March 1, 2018
Roy Peter Clark