Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoym… - Doris Kearns Goodwin

The vice presidency “ought to be abolished,” he told his friend Leonard Wood. “The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

Shortly before she left for New York, she received an unwelcome present from South Carolina — a painting depicting Lincoln “with a rope around his neck, his feet chained and his body adorned with tar and feathers.

As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.