“Smiling, I cut across the quadrangle toward the commons. I felt better about life than I had in a very long time. We could do this, Lissa and me. We could do this together.”

Death Comes as the End (1945)

Holly looks at him blankly. Freddy says, “Jones…you’re still new here People suggest ways to improve the company every day. Their ideas go into the suggestion box in the cafeteria—where the cafeteria was, I mean—and they’re never heard from again, except during all-staff meetings when Senior Management picks out the most useless one and announces a cross-functional team to look into it. A year or two later, when everyone’s forgotten about it, we get an e-mail announcing the implementation of something that bears no resemblance to the initial idea and usually has the opposite effect, and in the annual reports this is used as evidence that the company listens and reacts to its workers. That’s what happens when you try to make Zephyr a better place to work.”
Q4/2: November, pp. 208-209
Company (2006)

"Parks Recalls Bus Boycott, Excerpts from an interview with Lynn Neary", National Public Radio (1992), linked at "Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks Dies" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4973548, NPR, October 25, 2005.

" Greek finance minister: 'I don't know if we did the right thing' http://www.theguardian.com/business/video/2015/jul/16/greek-bailout-finance-minister-vote-video" (16 July 2015)

"1941", p. 336
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

As quoted in Screen Stories magazine (1967)
Context: I guess you could say that I was somewhat withdrawn from my classmates. I spent a good deal of time being a loner. I suppose that had something to do with the way we lived — always on the move, never living in one town very long. It's very hard to make lasting friendships that way. And my father was rather strict with me and my two younger sisters. He insisted on proper behaviour and very often vetoed our choices of boyfriends. There was always a curfew whenever my sisters or I would go out on a date — we had to be home on time or else. But I never resented his authority. In fact, I'm thankful for my strict upbringing; I feel it has helped me learn discipline — and that's very important in this business.

The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Context: What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?

Source: God-Shaped Hole