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"And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!"
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"By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle."

"Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers."

"No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading."

"Be able to read blueprints, diagrams, floorplans, and other diagrams used in the construction process."

"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."

"Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life."

"Books were everywhere, lined neatly on shelves that went from floor to ceiling. The ceiling was two stories high, with an upper balcony that provided access to a second-floor gallery. The dazzling array of red, gold, green, and brown bindings was a feast for the eyes, while the wonderful smells of vellum, parchment, and pungent leather almost caused Amanda to salivate. An exquisite waft of tea leaves lingered in the air. For anyone who enjoyed the pursuit of reading, this place surely was paradise."

"When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before."
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"I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him."


"Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes."


"But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics."


"The more I have studied Lincoln, the more I have followed his thought processes, the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president."


"The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that."


"What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them."


"I think, with the gay liberation movement has had need for heroes and heroines, and it would be rather nice to have Abraham Lincoln as your poster boy, wouldn't it?"


"Lincoln had no such person that he could talk with. Often, as a result, he debated with himself, and he would draw up a kind of list of the pros and cons of an argument, and carefully figure them out, and he might test them in public."
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