Good stuff

 

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets"

 
"What I saw during the Depression left me with the feeling that the economic system is subject to instant collapse at any particular moment--I still think so--and that security is an illusion which some people are fortunate enough not to outlive. On the long run, after all, we've had these crises--I don't know how many times in the last hundred years--not only we but every country. What one lived through in that case was for America a very unusual collapse in its depth and its breadth. A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression".

... Arthur Miller (1915-2005), an American playwright and essayist ... comment from an interview late in his life concerning his 1949 Pulitzer Prize play Death of a Salesman in the context of modern times.

... an expression of homely sagacity

sallow, queer, sagacious visage

"The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,—at least endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in front. But, on the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place."


... Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), american author, descibing Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) after meeting him at the White House in the midst of the Civil War (1862)