I've often said that the most important thing you can give your children is wings. Because, you're not gonna always be able to bring food to the nest. You're... sometimes... they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves.
Elizabeth EdwardsRead
What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the fleeting nature of public support for social issues, highlighting the need for sustained action and awareness.
Elizabeth Edwards emphasizes that, while the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina ignited a wave of humanitarian efforts and contributions from people willing to help, such momentum is often temporary. There is a tendency to forget the ongoing struggles faced by victims and marginalized communities, underscoring the importance of continuous engagement and advocacy for social justice.
In practice
In a fundraising speech to encourage ongoing support for disaster relief efforts.
I've often said that the most important thing you can give your children is wings. Because, you're not gonna always be able to bring food to the nest. You're... sometimes... they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves.
I've had to come to grips with a God that fits my own experience, which is, my God could not be offering protection and not have protected my boy.
Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable over something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn't matter.
I'm not a victim - I never want to be perceived that way.
I certainly have a lot to lament, as do we all, everybody has their griefs. But the griefs we can fix, shouldn't we go around fixing them?
... all things are possible if you are willing to put yourself on the line. You cannot stand back and hope for the best. You have to act.
Thankfully, dreams can change. If we'd all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.
What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse - we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won't think twice about it.
We must become the change we want to see.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
People don't flee their homes because they want to, people flee their homes because they feel they have to. Why? Because they don't have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don't have basic things like water, education, health.
If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can become better yourself.
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