Blaine Harden Quotes

“High School students in America debate why President Roosevelt didn't bomb the rail lines to Hitler's camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il's camps, and did nothing.”

“Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be.”

“Mom, camping is not a date; it's an endurance test. If you can survive camping with someone, you should marry them on the way home.”

“Why are we here? Why didn't God just make us and place us in Heaven? What is this place called Earth we're sent to reside in until we're called to live in Heaven for eternity? Training Camp Earth...it is the reason we're here. It is simply a training camp of lesson after lesson to build strength and our relationship with God before we go home. What lesson is God working on in your life today?”

“So, great. This is Camp…what do you call it? Camp Fish-Blood?”Aphros frowned. “I hope that was a joke. This is Camp __________.” He made a sound that was a series of sonar pings and hisses.”

“This is our recurring temptation—to live within our camp’s caves, taking turns both as the shadow-puppeteers and the audience. We chant our camp’s mantras repeatedly so they continue reverberating in our skulls. When we stay entrenched within our belief-camps, we create the illusion of secure reality by reinforcing each other’s presuppositions and paradigms. We choose specific watering holes of information and evidence, and we influence each other in interpreting that data in accordance with the conclusions we desire. Our camps reinforce our existing cognitive biases, making cheating all the more common and easy.”

“What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.”

“There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhsof human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even registertheir names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing theothers around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were builton the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of thegovernment made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internalmigrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected andleaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they tooleaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensarieslacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe fivethousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes andkidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and thepandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, todream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that whywas that why was that why was that why was that.”

“Without the intense touch of nature, you can never fully freshen yourself! Go for a camping and there both your weary mind and your exhausted body will rise like a morning sun!”

“I am 100% in the camp that says forgiveness is mostly about the forgiver.”