Rabbit, Run by John Updike, r. Jan. 2016

p. 38 Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; he has the disciplinarian's trick of waiting a long moment while his words gather weight.

p. 50 Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulder gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.

p. 81 In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

p. 92 And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing [marriage] Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.

p. 96 Pigeons with mechanical heads waddle away from their shoetips and resettle, chuffling, behind them.

p. 183 He's had very few visitors; I suppose that's the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you.

p. 194 The fullness [of youth] ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

p. 243 The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces stern in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery - the mystery of "any place," prelude to the ultimate, "Why am I me?" - reignites panic in his heart.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, r. Jan. 2016

p. 32 When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

p. 69 And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, and let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

p. 90 We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.

p. 100 Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?