Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, r. Nov. 2013

p. 22 Perhaps children remember only waiting for things. The moment events begin to occur they lose themselves in movement, like hypnotized dancers.

p. 28 We had caches of canned food and comic books at different places in the woods. We rarely used them; it was the idea that pleased us.

p. 111 I practiced the yo-yo because it pleased me to do so, without the slightest application of will power. It wasn't ambition that drove me, but the nature of yo-yoing. The yo-yo represented my first organized attempt to control the outside world. It fascinated me because I could see my progress in clearly defined stages, and because the intimacy of it, the almost spooky closeness I began to feel with the instrument in my hand, seemed to ensure that nothing irrelevant would interfere. I was, in the language of jazz, "up tight" with my yo-yo, and finally free, in one small area at least, of the paralyzing sloppiness of life in general.

p. 230 I read everything, without selection.... I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another.... The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. "I'm a novelist," he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say.

p. 265 My fever was high - at its apex - and I could no longer concentrate enough to read. I lay in bed dozing, half-hearing the music from the radio, drifting through time, dreaming, my body drenched with sweat. At intervals I would open my eyes, surprised each time to find the same reality around me.

p. 269 I could hear them talking about me, hear my name and see them looking at me the special way people look at you while talking about you in a language they know you can't understand - as if you were dead, or as if you were not sitting in the chair you are in fact sitting in, but had been a few moments earlier. All I could do was smile politely.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, r. Nov. 2013

p. xvi I learned - from actors and from audiences - how to shape a scene, how to build tension, and - above all - the necessity of being harsh with your own material, excising or rewriting anything that doesn't work. I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn...

p. xx Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along- the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.

p. xx Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.

p. xxiv Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

p. xxv The "true" story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

p. 35 "As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, and empire."

p. 35 "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."

p. 108 "But they made him a commander and so he has to act like one. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's winning, but that scares him worst of all, because he doesn't know why he's winning, except that I have something to do with it. Any minute somebody could find out that Rosen isn't some magic Israeli general who can win no matter what. He doesn't know why anybody wins or loses. Nobody does."