The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout, r. Jul. 2013

p. viii (intro by Walter Mosley) This juxtaposition of light and dark is much more satisfying than the struggle between good and evil. It is the essence of positive and negative space in literature.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, r. Jul. 2013

p. 18 I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down. So I never went with him to Zululand and I never saw the sea, ever. But that has not made me unhappy, not once.

p. 20 That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left along to look after their cattle.

p. 160 The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true. All the familiar objects of her daily life looked as if they belonged to somebody else, somebody called Mma Ramotswe, who was not quite the person walking about in pink slippers.

p. 162 What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass? None, in her view; none at all, and yet they did not know it.

Albert Schweitzer: Prophet in the Wilderness by Hermann Hagedorn, r. May 2013

p. 76 Difficult as it was for a mind trained in the humanities, to grapple with scientific formula, he welcomed the challenge. It was thrilling to him to be working with men who recognized that they must justify with facts every statement they made.

p. 139 The flight from rationalism, the flight from thinking, had for a generation been bad enough in all conscience, but never had there been such organized efforts by social, political, and even religious bodies to discredit individual thinking and persuade men to yield their minds to the authority of groups seeking strength not in ideas but in an enforced unanimity. Everything a man saw or read, everyone he encountered, the associations which claimed his loyalty, all drove in on him the same propaganda of self-distrust and dependence. Men seemed no longer to have any spiritual self-confidence. Efficient, no doubt, they were, in material things, yes, but mentally and spiritually stunted. How incredible that a generation, which had achieved so much in discovery and invention, could sink so low as to relinquish its right to think for itself. What spiritual bankruptcy!

p. 156 It is the fate of every truth that it shall be a subject for laughter before it is generally recognized.

p. 168 "Pshaw, you get used to anything," responded the Doctor. "You simply have to. It all depends on your living for something. Most people nowadays live against something."

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, r. May 2013

p. 22 It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

p. 23 Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you - smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.'

p. 54 '...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone.

p. 57 I don't like work - no man does - but I like what is in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie, r. May 2013

p. 295 Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey? So many causes, motives, and impulses intertwine to form the semblance of a reason.

The Village of Waiting by George Packer, r. Apr. 2013

p. 33 But to the Togolese I knew - especially the villagers - wealth seemed natural to yovos, a part of our constitution, like stomach disorders and nasal voices.

p. 75 Even under a black government, contempt for the black man hadn't been forgotten.

p. 100 Encounter with yovos seemed to touch some chord in fous, of delight, anger, desire, humor, or sorrow - something so deep and troubling that in sane Africans years of social formality kept it hidden. A flash of recognition, a wound or hope too tender to be laid open by anyone who wasn't out of his senses.

p. 137 As the tide of Westernization washed over Africa, one change it brought was the weakening of personal ties in the village, under a different, Western code that demanded loyalty of an individual to his public role, his country to people he didn't know, to a tribe he perhaps despised.

p. 184 "In Lagos I am one man," Max answered, losing his smile. "But when I go home with the money to my village, I am another man. No French, no English, no Bob Marley. I carry water like the others. I am happy there and happy here. How can I go making differences, that this one is better than that one? I have too many other things to go worrying about things like that."

p. 194 Here [in tourist-town Nairobi] there were no anecdotes, and no defeats. The old strain of struggling and failing to live with Africans on something like their terms was lifted; whites were in the saddle again.

p. 196 And the mood itself - an exasperation and gloom because of my mother's presence here, the felling of resistance and futility that had begun in Kenya - came of the fact that there was so much I couldn't share with her [about Peace Corps life in the small village of Lavie].... For a year I'd concealed much of myself from the village; now I was concealing myself from my mother as well.

p. 301 He had been educated to the ears, and sixteen years of school had cut him off from the life of his village. Now the promise of sacrifice had been broken, and he was trapped in Lome with a headful of knowledge and nowhere to go. He must have wondered if it wouldn't have been better never to have left the fields.

p. 307 If Lavie ever got the electricity the chief wanted, it would look like this: harsh, white, with a machine buzz drowning out the buzz of the bush.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, r. Apr. 2013

p. viii There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

p. x It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his duty to show.

p. 116 'The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos. 'I see what is right and approve, but do what is wrong.'

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, r. Mar. 2013

p. 14 It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. 

p. 85 ...that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.

p. 132 We don't think of ourselves as citizens - parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.

p. 159 I don't remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards. I never did anything, but at the same time I could normally never sit still and become aware of what was really going on.

p. 226 If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

p. 231 ...gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.... there is no audience.

p. 234 In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts.

p. 291 It's not just that real memory is fragmentary; I think it's also that overall relevance and meaning are conceptual, while the experiential bits that get locked down and are easiest, years later, to retrieve tend to be sensory.

p. 440 It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

p. 458 Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

p. 548 Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

p. 3b It is possible to see the federal government as a parasite feeding on the lifeblood of the taxpayer. But blood is made to circulate, to replenish; it moves or there is death.

p. 7b I do not much care whether you like me - I myself dislike storytellers whose chief concern is that they themselves be liked or thought a clever storyteller.

p. 24b The more extraneous choices, the more hidden the real thing.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, r. Feb. 2013

p. 188 Dr. Stockmann: I have always loved my native town as a man only can love the home of his youthful days. I was not old when I went away from here; and exile, longing, and memories cast as it were an additional halo over both the town and its inhabitants.

Light in August by William Faulkner, r. Jan. 2013

p. 25 "For money and excitement," Varner says. "Lucas ain't the first young buck that's throwed over what he was bred to do and them that depended on him for money and excitement."

p. 47 Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

p. 70 Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to do.

p. 253 But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you.

p. 289 Better than the musty offices where the lawyers waited lurking among ghosts of old lusts and lies, or where the doctors waited with sharp knives and sharp drugs, telling man, believing that he should believe, without resorting to printed admonishments, that they labored for that end whose ultimate attainment would leave them with nothing whatever to do. 

p. 331 It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

p. 467 Woman (not the seminary, as he had once believed): the Passive and Anonymous whom God had created to be not alone the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach.

p. 472 And the wife...liked him, admired him in a hushed, alarmed, secret way: his swagger, his bluff and simple adherence to a simple code.

p. 486 ...the faces of old men lined by that sheer accumulation of frustration and doubt which is so often the other side of the picture of hale and respected full years - the side, by the way, which the subject and proprietor of the picture has to look at, cannot escape looking at.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, r. Dec. 2012

p. 27 Not for one moment did I doubt that you were the Buddha, that you have reached the highest goal which so many thousands of Brahmins and Brahmins' sons are striving to reach. You have done so by your own seeking, in your own way, through thought, through meditation, through knowledge, through enlightenment. You have learned nothing through teachings, and so I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings. To nobody, O Illustrious One, can you communicate in words and teachings what happened to you in the hour of your enlightenment. The teachings of the enlightened Buddha embrace much, they teach much - how to live righteously, how to avoid evil. But there is one thing that this clear, worthy instruction does not contain; it does not contain to secret of what the Illustrious One himself experienced..."

p. 57 At times he heard within him a soft, gentle voice, which reminded him quietly, complained quietly, so that he could hardly hear it. Then he suddenly saw clearly that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing many things that were only a game, that he was quite cheerful and sometimes experienced pleasure, but that real life was flowing past him and did not touch him.

p. 68 When he looked up and saw the stars, he though: I am sitting here under my mango tree, in my pleasure garden. He smiled a little. Was it necessary, was it right, was it not a foolish thing that he should possess a mango tree and a garden?

p. 78 I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again, to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again.

p. 87 But he learned more from the river that Vasudeva could teach him. He learned continually. Above all, he learned from it how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinions.

p. 87 READ THIS PART that starts "Yes, Siddhartha..." about life being a river

p. 116 The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life.

p. 119 Also with this great teacher, the thing to me is of greater importance than the words; his deeds and life are more important to me than his talk, the gesture of this hand is more important to me than his opinions. Not in speech or though do I regard him as a great man, but in his deeds and life.

Maphead by Ken Jennings, r. Dec. 2012

p. 30 The sociologist Ruth Hill Useem coined the term "Third Culture Kids" to refer to nationality-confused global nomads like me, because, she said, we fuse our birth culture and our adopted culture into some entirely new, blended culture. But I didn't necessarily feel like a man without a country. I knew where home was; I just wasn't living there.

p. 31 "To be rooted," wrote Simone Weil, "is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul."

p. 40 Some people with odd obsessions become acutely aware of how their expertise makes them different (cf. my childhood love of maps). But others blithely assume that everyone shares their fanaticism, as you probably know if you ever had a college roommate whose favorite band was Rush.

p. 44 American parents often cite "stranger danger," without seeming aware that only 115 U.S. children are abducted by strangers every year - almost a one-in-a-million occurrence, not something to base a lifestyle on.

p. 57 Being so close to so much laboriously gathered information gives me a strange satisfaction with the scope of human ingenuity, the way other people might feel visiting Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China.

Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh, r. Nov. 2012

p. 16 Can I feel her touch, or do I just think I can? Did I really hear my parents or was it all my imagination? I know not and care less. All I have is the data I get. I don't care whether it's produced by my senses or my memory or my imagination. Where it comes from is less important than the fact that it is. The only reality is the images and texts.
p. 228 You only live twice 

Or so it seems

One life for yourself

And one for your dreams...

This dream is for you

So pay the price

Make one dream come true

You only live twice

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, r. Nov. 2012

p. 269 Some computer scientists, inspired by the infant, believe that a good robot should learn an internal software model of its articulators by observing the consequences of its own babbling and flailing.

p. 301 Thus language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

p. 336 And quantitative research corroborates the hundreds of anecdotes. Not only are general traits like IQ, extroversion, and neuroticism partly heritable, but so are specific ones like degree of religious feeling, vocational interests, and opinions about the death penalty, disarmament, and computer music.

p. 387 As for outlawing sentences that end with a preposition - as Winston Churchill would have said, it is a rule up with which we should not put.

p. 416 Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks in writing well.

p. 448 The banter among New Guinean highlanders in the film of their first contact with the world, the motions of a sign language interpreter, the prattle of little girls in a Tokyo playground - I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.

The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson, r. Oct. 2012

p. xiii And here is one more circumstance on which I often reflect: as a child I could in theory have spoken to old men who visited you at Walden Pond when they were children of the same age. Thus only one living memory separates us. At the cabin site even that seems to visit.

p. xxi When you stripped your outside obligations to the survivable minimum, you place your trained and very active mind in an unendurable vacuum. And this is the essence of the matter: in order to fill the vacuum, you discovered the human proclivity to embrace the natural world.

p. 102 The somber archaeology of vanished species has taught us the following lessons: -The noble savage never existed. -Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse. -Paradise found is paradise lost. Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own short-term survival.

p. 151 Moral reasoning is not a cultural artifact invented for convenience. It is and always has been the vital glue of society, the means by which transactions are made and honored to ensure survival. Every society is guided by ethical precepts, and every one of its members is expected to follow moral leadership and ethics-based tribal law.

p. 152 The first step is to turn away from claims of inherent moral superiority based on political ideology and religious dogma. The problems of the environment have become too complicated to be solved by piety and an unyielding clash of good intentions.

The Shack by William P. Young, r. Sep. 2012

p. 145 "To force my will on you," Jesus replied, "is exactly what love does not do. Genuine relationships are marked by submission even when your choices are not helpful or healthy."

p. 248 Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, r. Sep. 2012

p. 7 Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

p. 11 "We have indeed advanced, thanks to the Machine," repeated the attendant, and hid the Himalayas behind a metal blind.

p. 15 That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

p. 16 For Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on.

p. 19 "Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?"

p. 25 The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace, r. Sep. 2012

p. 187 And the woman is weeping, her secret is out, she has a tree toad living in her neck.

p. 287 But then if you get to where you, you know, love a person, everything sort of reverses. It's not that you love the person because of certain things about the person anymore; it's that you love the things about the person because you love the person. It kind of radiates out, instead of in. At least that's the way...oh, excuse me. That's the way it seems to me.

p. 309 [Average collegiate material] tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naive. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course.

Sports Illustrated Scrabble Article from 1995, r. Aug. 2012

This is not a rare sentiment in Scrabble it is, in fact, something of a necessity to surrender yourself to the whim of the game Unlike chess, which is a distillation of learned strategy, success in Scrabble hinges on constantly shifting fate. You never know whether you'll get that precious blank or a fistful of garbage. The bag is god, the bag is chaos—and Scrabble is, in that narrow sense, quite like life; you can only work with the pieces you're given. That's why so many top-level players burn out. "They get frustrated because they know so much but they can't reach the pinnacle," says Cree. "They get screwed by Lady Luck, and it's just too much to take."

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1007571/1/index.htm

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse, r. Aug. 2012

p. 62 The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness. There is something that seems to speak to the deeps in me in the beaming smile of my hostess and the furtive whisper of my host, as he plucks at my elbow and says 'Let's get our of here and go and have a whisky and soda in the gun room.' It is on such occasions as this, it has often been said, that you catch Bertram Wooster at this best.

p. 167 Here, with a sniff like the tearing of a piece of calico, she buried the bean in her hands, and broke into what are called uncontrollable sobs.

p. 284 "The year's at the spring, the day's at the morn, morning's at seven, the hill-side's dew-pearled, the lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn, God's in His heaven, all's right with the world."

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson, r. Jul. 2012

p. 31 Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God's province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent.

p. 60 Isaac was twenty-three years old in a new country in a world where anything was possible. He was in the thick of it when everyone else back home could only read about it in the newspapers and in Jules Verne and in the thousands of dime novels about Buffalo Bill Cody. Isaac was a pioneer in a new science, a prairie Dampier, at a time when an ordinary man with patience and a knack for observation could change forever the way the world saw itself. Far to the north in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory another young man, Teddy Roosevelt of New York, was busy "pioneering" along with other East Coast blue bloods like Frederic Remington and Owen Wister, later to write The Virginian, who hoped to experience the frontier life before it disappeared. Roosevelt called this way of living "the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live."

p. 69 He continued Greely's campaign to reduce public skepticism about the bureau's ability to do much beyond simply recording changes in the weather. At the time of Harrington's appointment, Isaac wrote, "weather forecasting was nothing more than a listing of probabilities." Even something as basic as predicting the temperature twenty-four hours in advance was considered so likely to result in failure and public ridicule that the bureau forbade it.

p. 228 ... Sterett said, "I would rather have seen all the vessels of the earth stranded high and dry than to have seen this child's toy standing right out on the prairie, masterless."

p. 248 There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby. "A dream," Freud wrote, in 1900, in his Interpretation of Dreams, "is the fulfillment of a wish."

p. 266 A silence settled over Galveston. Its population stopped growing. It acquired all the sorrows of modern urban life, but none of the density and vibrance. It became a beach town for Houston.

p. 272 "Time can never be recovered," he said, "and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere."

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, r. Jul. 2012

p. 94 I believe it was Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind who said that fortunes can be made only during the building up or tearing down of an empire, and Salazar certainly subscribed to that theory. In the so-called wolfram water, the Portuguese dictator had the last lycanthropic laugh.

p. 175 Still, Pasteur knew that luck explained just part of his success. As he himself declared, "Chance favors only the prepared mind."

p. 225 The desire for a great adventure and the love of riches are practically built into human nature. As such, history is dotted with innumerable gold rushes.

p. 260 A pathological science takes advantage of that caution. Basically, its believers use the ambiguity about evidence as evidence - claiming that scientists don't know everything and therefore there's room for my pet theory, too.

Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, r. Jul. 2012

p. 37 Vegas would not be the end of the story, however. On May 10, itchy feet returned and Alex left his job in Vegas, retrieved his backpack, and hit the road again, though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won't be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991 - January 7, 1992. But this is not important. It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.

p. 38 The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. - Jack London, The Call of the Wild

p. 57 The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly channging horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

p. 57 You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have to courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

p. 66 We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.... Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too powerful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

p. 67 "Alex struck me as much older than twenty-four. Everything I said, he'd demand to know more about what I meant, about why I though this way or that. He was hungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs.

p. 70 It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought. -Theodore Roszak, "In Search of the Miraculous"

p. 87 It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that means so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty....

p. 96 We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again. And that's what Everett was doing.

p. 117 Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. -Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods

p. 138 For two days I slogged steadily up the valley of ice. The weather was good, the route obvious and without major obstacles. Because I was alone, however, even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.

p. 150 There was another irony he failed to appreciate: His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.

p. 155 It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.... I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

p. 169 I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; the rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire? - Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

p. 187 Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one's neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man - without them he is unthinkable - the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. - Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

p. 189 Next to "And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.... And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."

Las Cinco Personas Que Encontraras En El Cielo by Mitch Albom, r. Jun. 2012

p. 11 Ninguna historia funciona por si sola. A veces las historias se tocan en los bordes y otras veces se tapan completamente una a otra, como piedras debajo de un rio.

p. 32 A cualquiera le podria haber parecido ridiculo ver a aquel empleado de mantenimiento con el pelo blanco, completamente solo, jugando al avion. Pero el nino que corre esta dentro de todos los hombres, sin importar su edad.

p. 104 Esa es la cuestion. A veces cuando uno sacrifica algo precioso, en realidad no lo esta perdiendo. Simplemente se lo esta dando a otro. 

p. 139 Los padres muy pocas veces dejan que sus hijos se vayan, do modo que son los hijos los que se van. Se trasladan. Se alejan. Lo que antes solia definirlos- la aprobacion de su madre, el asentimiento de su padre- quedo remplazado por sus propios logros. Hasta mucho mas tarde, cuando la piel se arruga y el corazon se debilita, los hijos no entienden; sus historias y todos sus logros se asentan sobre las historias de sus padres y madres, piedra sobre piedra, por debajo de las aguas de su vida.

p. 173 Oh, Eddid, nunca cambian, cuando el novio levanta el velo, cuando la novia recibe el anillo, las esperanzas que les asoman a los ojos son iguales en todo el mundo. Creen de verdad que su amor y su matrimonio van a batir todos los records.

p. 191 El amor (or memories of an event, a trip, a time?) perdido sigue siendo amor, Eddie. Adquiere una forma diferente, eso es todo. No puedes ver la sonrise de esa persona o llevarle comida o acariciarle el pelo o dar vueltas con ella en una pista de balie, pero cuando esos sentidos se debilitan, otros se fortalecen. La memoria. La memoria se convierte en tu companera. Uno la alimenta, y se aferra a ella, y baila con ella.

p. 216 Y en aquella cola habia ahora un anciano con patillas, con una gorra de tela y una nariz ganchuda, que esperaba delante de un sitio que se llamaba Pista de Baile Polvo de Estrellas para compartir su parte del secreto del cielo: que cada uno influye en el otro y este lo hace en el siguiente, que el mundo esta lleno de historias, pero que las historias son todas una. (last line of book)

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien, r. Jun. 2012

p. 1122 The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.

p. 1186 'A great Shadow has departed,' said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sounds was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known.

p. 1210 And Gandalf said: 'Many folk like to know beforehand what is to be set on the table; but those who have laboured to prepare the feast like to keep their secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder.'

p. 1276 In the Southfarthing the vines were laden, and the yield of 'leaf' was astonishing; and everywhere there was so much corn that at Harvest every barn was stuffed. The Northfarthing barley was so fine that the beer of 1420 malt was long remembered and became a byword. Indeed a generation later one might hear an old gaffer in an inn, after a good pint of well-earned ale, put down his mug with a sigh: 'Ah! that was proper fourteen-twenty, that was!'

p. 1283 I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, r. May 2012

p. 73 "I was dreaming," Mr Thoth told her, "about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel," laughing, "as if I have been 91 all my life. Oh, the stories that old man would tell..."

p. 79 He poured her some dandelion wine. "It's clearer now," he said, rather formal. "A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered." No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

The Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White, r. Apr. 2012

p. 10 Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum.
p. 47 I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
p. 97 No longer is a small town autonomous - it is a creature of the state and of the Federal Government.
p. 111 But I feel sadness at All Last Things, too, which is probably a purely selfish, or turned-in, emotion - sorrow not at my dog's death but at my own, which hasn't even occurred yet but which saddens me just to think about in such pleasant surroundings.
p. 127 Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
p. 135 "The trouble today," [de Madariaga] wrote, "is that the Communist world understands unity but not liberty, while the free world understands liberty but not unity. Eventual victory may be won by the first of the two sides to achieve the synthesis of both liberty and unity."
p. 147 ...so many million dollars spent on the idea that our trains and our motorcars should go fast and smoothly, and the child remembering, not the smoothness, but the great--big--BUMP.
p. 165 Men [nowadays] go to saloons to gaze at televised events instead of to think long thoughts.
p. 182 "She is at that enviable moment in life (I thought) when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start."
p. 185 The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change - and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.
p. 210 ...there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
p. 247 It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing.
p. 301 "This curious world which we inhabit is far more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used." He would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.
p. 303 Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
p. 323 [From Strunk] "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
p. 363 [From his Aunt Caroline in her nineties] 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the rememberance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive world.

Valparaiso by Don DeLillo, r. Mar. 2012

p. 23 Interviewer: But not completely subhuman. Not some furry coupling designed to reproduce the beaver species so they can fell their trees and build their beaver dams to whatever mysterious ecological end and deep personal satisfaction.

p. 67 Delfina: But all the sexier, yes, in you body-hugging briefs. Teddy knows it's true. Each life so dense and rich. And the lives of the guests.

p. 70 Livia: Yes, I do, in my compact car, stopped in traffic somewhere, with my life sort of bug-stuck on the windshield.

p. 71 Livia: I'm a little bit of everything around me. Who am I. But completely separate at the same time. I'm whoever it is that has my memories. I'm part my mother, my father, my husband, my son. Part my car, my house. My dog if we had a dog. My hometown, a whole lot. But completely someone separate. I used to be a little knock-kneed. My father called me a knock-kneed creature of the earth. That's who I am.

p. 83 Delfina: Do not disappear off camera. Michael. Or none of this will have happened. Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

p. 97 Michael: Why do you need to know? Delfina caresses him lightly from behind. Delfina: Because we can't stop needing. Because everything's disposable.

p. 101 Delfina: Waxed or unwaxed. Because this is what we need to know.

Love In The Ruins by Percy Walker, r. Feb. 2012

p. 25 Was it not John Locke who said that the mark of genius is the ability to discern not this thing or that thing but rather the connection between the two?
p. 33 Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world.
p. 35 At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of self through ordeal.
p. 74 People are kind. They find it easy to forgive you in the name of tragedy or insanity and most of all if you are smart.
p. 148 Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same. The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.
p. 152 I feel like a one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.
p. 201 How can a man spend 45 years as a stranger to himself? No other creature would do such a thing. No animal would, for he is pure organism. No angel would, for he is pure spirit.
p. 321 "We'll live at Tara," says Lola past my arm in the prosaic casting-ahead voice of a woman planning tomorrow's meals.
p. 353 "Don't commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." "Which one is that?" "The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven you."
p. 360 Strange: I am older, yet there seems to be more time, time for watching and waiting and thinking and working.
p. 379 (last sentence) To bed we go for a long winter's nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, r. Jan. 2012

p. 244 Knowles seems to be one of these people who view the world's inconveniences as specific and personal, and it makes my stomach hurt to watch him.

p. 317 In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, t. Dec. 2011

(all taken from a GoodReads review by Scoobs, transcribed)

"It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."

"If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat."

"Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place."

"You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

180 Degrees South [documentary], w. Dec. 2011

The best journeys answer questions that in the beginning you didn't even think to ask.

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, r. Dec. 2011

p. 845 "The she must be lovely indeed," said Faramir. "Perilously fair." - "I don't know about perilous," said Sam. "It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lorien, and finds it there because they've brought it."

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, r. Nov. 2011

p. 181: "Here is a pretty toy for Tom and for his lady! Fair was she who long ago wore this on her shoulder. Goldberry shall wear it now, and we will not forget her!"

p. 286: Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is. (Rivendell)

p. 330: "And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one."

p. 334: Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

p. 431: Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, r. Oct. 2011

p. 113: Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

p. 116: Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You've got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he's made to get to the plateau, and doesn't mind staying at the plateau because it's comfortable and familiar, and he doesn't worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he's designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still - his whole game beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he says he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he's content. Until one day there's a quiet knock at the door.

p. 445: He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ' What the fuck is water?' and swim away.

p. 680: For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, so, then, one of two things we see will happen. [essentially, suicide or fatal celebration]

p. 900: The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about. It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something. maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These room blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

p. 1040: Cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.

p. 1048: The "vailed warning" (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way.... it is a pose of poselessness.... Spend a little time with Orin's Uncle Charles a.k.a. "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow" Tavis if you want to see real openness in motion, and you will see that genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, r. Sep. 2011

p. 215: It said: The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phrases. "For instance, the first phrase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, r. Sep. 2011

p. 299 "Murtagh was right about women. Sassenach, I risked my life for ye, committing theft, arson, assault, and murder into the bargain. In return for which ye call me names, insult my manhood, kick me in the ballocks, and claw my face. Then I beat you half to death and tell ye all the most humiliating things have ever happened to me, and you say ye love me." He laid his head on his knees and laughed some more. Finally he rose and held out a hand to me, wiping his eyes with the other. "You're no verra sensible, Sassenach, but I like ye fine. Let's go."

p. 410 He pulled himself gently from my grasp without answering and stood back, suddenly a figure from another time, seen in relief upon a background of hazy hills, the life in his face a trick of the shadowing rock, as if flattened beneath layers of paint, an artist's reminiscence of forgotten places and passions turned to dust. I looked into his eyes, filled with pain and yearning, and he was flesh again, real and immediate, love, husband, man.

p. 434 After breakfast the men prepared to go out, visiting tenants, inspecting fences, mending wagons, and generally enjoying themselves.

p. 580 It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis, r. Aug. 2011

p. 238

What happened next bolsters one's faith in the American educational system: Voros McCracken set out to prove himself wrong.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, r. Jul. 2011

p. 66 In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his works. The churches were the center of the social and intellectual life of the times. The figure of God was big in the hearts of men.

 p. 79 Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing that was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-night forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about him.

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, r. Jun. 2011

(p. 179)

I crawled beyind him through a ten-foot-long pitch-black tunnel and emerged into a room filled neck-deep with balloons. Each room, he explained, was supposed to function like a chamber of a memory palace. His party was designed to be maximally memorable.
"Too often one is just left in a haze about what happened at a party because it's a single, undifferentiated space," he said. "One of the advantages of this kind of setup is that the experiences in each room get kept in each room, and are isolated from other experiences. One leaves the party with a beautiful repertoire of events, upon which one can dwell during old and middle age."

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, r. Apr. 2011

The story the Leavers have been enacting here for the past three million years isn't a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn't give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them. p. 147

I was afraid I was dreaming. I sometimes fly in my dreams, and each time I say to myself, "At last - it's happening in reality and not in a dream!" p. 28

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, r. Apr. 2011

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting; you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote. -p. 207

A leader's true authority is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not in a resigned or resentful way but happily; it feels right. -p. 225

But if you're subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough - like from you earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say - it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself. -p. 227

Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox - the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain - is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. - p. 234

By turning against the popular utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, [Kant] also knew exactly that what was at stake was not any particular moral code, but rather a question of the existence or nonexistence of the distinction between good and evil and, consequently, a question of the fate of mankind - p. 271