Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, r. Aug. 2026

Page 8 Cricket thought he might go outside and fill the can from the hose, but it was January, no more than ten degrees outside, the sky frozen and white, the trees terrified and bare.

Page 10 “You are contained,” Silas said. “You can visit with your mother, or spend time with me. Or you can go into the world outside and look at its endlessness. And always you have the life you can conjure on your own. You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper. Right?”

Page 15 Cricket looked at her and thought he recognized her. A grade above was another world. He saw those kids as he saw adults, teachers, cops. But she did look familiar. The boy, though, he didn’t know. He might be from out of town, a far more dangerous category of teenager. A teenager from out of town was capable of anything—even murder.

Page 28 But he circled and ovaled for a minute or so, and though his lines were more tentative and did not have Oana’s flourish and accuracy, in the end he created a general shape not unlike hers. He blinked rapidly at his drawing. It was, already, unlike anything he’d ever done. It was much like hers, and it was like the objects in front of him, and yet it was somehow his.

Page 36 He convulsed, and she massaged his head with her hands, round and round like a planetary storm.

Page 52 Jed had been held back, then kicked out and now attended the Boys Academy, a gloomy campus on the edge of town where the most wayward and unpromising young men went. Jed’s father was a cop.

Page 94 “I’m really glad you could come today,” she said, and put her hand on his. It was very warm and his childhood ended. Now he was a young man who women touched suggestively at the track.

Page 96 He closed his book, reshelved it and left the library through the side door. The door boomed when he opened it and whispered when it closed.

Page 96 Outside, the air was cold and crisp and hit him like love. The ancient trees stood over him, nodding in quiet tribute. When he got back to work, the Whistlestop smelled of cigarette smoke and snow. Jed was sitting at one of the dinettes with a woman of about twenty-two.

Page 135 He drew the log truthfully and stayed until dark. When he was finished he examined his work, feeling like the day could not have been spent in any better way. The day was gone but the drawing would remain. Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time.

Page 157 ...and the surfaces were alive, were untamed and varied and rewarded close inspection.

Page 166 “I recognize that many among you are not draftsmen. You are not interested in rendering the world as you see it. That is fine. The art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw. But I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it. When we hound certain kinds of artists out of this school—hound out the most naturally and classically skilled, lord help us!—we engage in a kind of upside-down artistic fascism that reminds me of Pol Pot purging his country of intellectuals.”

Page 168 “Beauty justifies itself!” Carpenter yelled. “There is a perfectly inverse relationship between talent and the need to explain itself. The artist’s only rational response to ‘Why did you make this?’ is ‘Because I wanted to’ or ‘Because it felt right.’ Everything else is sophistry!”

Page 168 You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not. You have been fed the lie that your peers’ success means your failure. It is not. You have been fed the lie that greatness emerges from cruelty. This has never been true and never will be true. These group crits have no purpose and accomplish nothing. They kill the heroes and reward the scavengers. They must end.”

Page 178 As professors, they’re forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which lead to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous.”

Page 189 And I had an anthropologist friend—he’d studied people all over the world for fifty years. He said the happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it. Is that happiness?”

Page 244 The idea of creation was delicious, pure pleasure, while the execution of that idea was so often an unendurable slog ending in tragic disappointment. So rarely could he realize the image in his mind, and even if he could, what would he do with it? Show it in an empty gallery next to the work of Peter-James Flemming?

Page 247 Shit, what if that happens to us? Every day in art should be like running down a hill, arms waving, shrieking. Not sitting at a desk writing down auction prices. Are they nice to you at least?”

Page 253 “And I haven’t done anything yet. At thirty everyone judges you, right? You need something to have happened before thirty. Otherwise you’re late and worthless and all is lost.”

Page 276 When we create well, the world is good, he thought. We’ve wrestled amorphous ideas into knowable shapes, we’ve improved—even glorified—flesh on canvas, we’ve made something greater than ourselves.

Page 343 But rarely did anything go to plan, and it was even rarer to have a work of art received as hoped. And so what was left? What was left, what was the only refuge, was the simple joy in creation. In making something appear. But Kyle was not joyful. And Olympia was not joyful. And the workers in the studio were there to pay for their lives outside the studio. And the billionaires who bought Kyle’s work were investors, not lovers. So together, everyone involved, from Cricket on up—they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them.

Page 360 She was a muscular, angular being—a practical person

Page 369 It was only in seeing friends, also on their joined journey of decline, that he saw aging’s wretched work.

Page 381 God, look at this. What do you think: Is there just enough beauty in the world, or too much? You have only two choices.” “Too much,” he said. “Good answer,” she said, and stood in the water, motionless for a long while.

Page 409 The quiet and sacred world of now that he’d tended had been punctured, and the past was rushing through, filling the room.

Page 413 “And yet it didn’t matter,” she said. “All these things we did, if only we knew how little any one of them mattered. You could do a thousand things in a life.”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, r. Apr. 2024

Location 4063 If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. Madame Guiboux, mother of the shoemaker, has left town. As has old Madame Blanchard. So many windows are dark. It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

Location 4669 Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing different scales with each hand—what sounds like three hands, four—the harmonies like steadily thickening pearls on a strand, and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.

Location 5430 He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

Location 5843 Every fall, she teaches a class to undergraduates, and her students come and go, smelling of salted beef, or cologne, or the gasoline of their motor scooters, and she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they’ve had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts.

Location 5874 Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn’t it?

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, r. Jan. 2023

p. 14 And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.

p. 67 "One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more."

p. 71 "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, r. April 2020

p. 4 In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

p. 50 Opposite the hotel was a barren little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be, but for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty: it had grass, four poplars, benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes.

p. 55 The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.

p. 59 Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.

p. 59 Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

p. 88 While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

p. 103 "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities."

p. 110 The mass was beautiful because it appeared to her in a sudden, mysterious revelation as a world betrayed. From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.

p. 156 Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.

p. 170 She went outside and set off in the direction of the embankment. She wanted to see the Vltava. She wanted to stand on its banks and look long and hard into its waters, because the sight of the flow was soothing and healing. The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

p. 221 As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? ... The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.

p. 246 Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

p. 257 ... political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.... The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

p. 278 And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

p. 289 We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

p. 298 And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.