At Home by Bill Bryson, r. Jan. 2014

p. 6 ...that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays or new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street.

p. 184 This new and swelling middle class served not only the very wealthy but also, even more lucratively, one another. This was the change that made the modern world.

p. 350 Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived...

p. 532 Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in just the last twenty years. Disproportionately, it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction. Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American...

Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, r. Dec. 2013

p. 18 The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.

p. 51 The goofy thing about Christian faith is that you believe it and don't believe it at the same time. It isn't unlike having an imaginary friend. I believe in Jesus; I believe He is the Son of God, but every time I sit down to explain this to somebody I feel like a palm reader, like somebody who works at a circus...

p. 54 Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don't make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

p. 57 In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton says chess players go crazy, not poets. I think he is right. You'd go crazy trying to explain penguins. It's best just to watch them and be entertained. I don't think you can explain how Christian faith works either. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.

p. 77 I found myself trying to love the right things without God's help, and it was impossible. I tried to go one week without thinking a negative thought about another human being, and I couldn't do it. Before I tried that experiment, I thought I was a nice person, but after trying it, I realized I thought bad things about people all day long, and that, like Tony says, my natural desire was to love darkness.

p. 98 I started thinking about how odd it was to be human, how we are stuck inside this skin, forced to be attracted to the opposite sex, forced to eat food and use the rest room and then stuck to the earth by gravity.... I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like an experience of freedom.

p. 100 There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.... I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife.

p. 109 If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you. People hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. If you are passionate about something, people will follow you because they think you know something they don't, some clue to the meaning of the universe.

p. 110 Andrew is the one who taught me that what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.

p. 122 You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.

p. 144 "You know, Don, marriage is worth the trade. You lose all your freedom, but you get this friend. This incredible friend."

p. 146 "It is great, don't get me wrong, and I am glad I married Danielle, and I will be with her forever. But there are places in our lives that only God can go."

p. 171 On of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the glove. Stacy says this is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God.

p. 181 Having had my way for so long, I became defensive about what I perceived as encroachments on my rights. My personal bubble was huge. I couldn't have conversations that lasted more than ten minutes. I wanted efficiency in personal interaction, and while listening to one of my housemates talk, I wondered why the couldn't get to the point. Tuck told me later that in the first few months of living with me he felt judged, as though there was something wrong with him. He felt unvalued any time he was around me.

p. 192 A writer I like named Ravi Zacharias says that the heart desires wonder and magic. He says technology is what man uses to supplant the desire for wonder. Ravi Zacharias says that what the heart is really longing to do is worship, to stand in awe of a God we don't understand and can't explain.

p. 206 And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

p. 220 God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson. Here is something simple about relationships that Spencer helped me discover: Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.

p. 221 When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communication that I like the person I am talking to or I don't. God wants both conversations to be true.... The Bible says that if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and your heart does not love them, that you are like a person standing there smashing two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you. I think that is very beautiful and true.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, r. Dec. 2013

p. 102 ... for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.

From Chris Stohs' Facebook wall, r. Dec. 2013

A fellow named Joe Long said this "I find it striking how 'change' is viewed in the abstract as a positive. 'I just want my children to Change the World' is an unquestioned cliché, a bit of happy-talk; but I think it a far finer thing to identify things worth preserving and perpetuation. It's hard, but it's more of an achievement. Change, like another well-know by-product of life functions, just happens. Leave things alone and they will change: They will break down and rot. Ah, but to fight, sometimes even briefly to reverse decay: That is a task worthy of a hero."

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, r. Dec. 2013

p. 89 The reason I told Ransom K. Fern to give you this letter only if your luck turned bad is that nobody thinks or notices anything as long as his luck is good. Why should he?

p. 124 The questions are important. I have thought harder about them than I have the answers I already have. That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.

p. 126 Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer's understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.

p. 185 Not to be lonely, not to be scared - Boaz had decided that those were the important things in life. A real buddy could help more than anything.

p. 205 "I don't know what's going on," said Boaz in his thoughts, "and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over."

p. 265 The sermon of the panorama was that even a man without a friend in the Universe could still find his home planet mysteriously, heartbreakingly beautiful.

p. 315 " 'I would be the last to deny,' " sad Beatrice, reading her own work out loud, " 'that the forces of Tralfamadore have had something to do with the affairs of Earth. However, those persons who have served the interests of Tralfamadore have served them in such highly personalized ways that Tralfamadore can be said to have had practically nothing to do with the case.' "

p. 317 "The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody."

p. 320 "You finally fell in love, I see," said Salo. "Only an Earthling year ago," said Constant. "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

Budget Battles and the Growth of the Administrative State (Imprimis) by John Marini, r. Dec. 2013

John Locke, the most important political theorist of the American Founding era, described laws as a community's "standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties." None of these elements are to be found in the Affordable Care Act. As Charles Kesler noted in the Claremont Review of Books, such laws "start not from equal rights but from equal (and often unequal) privileges, the favors or benefits that government may bestow on or withhold from its clients. The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. When law ceases to be a common standard of right and wrong and a common measure to decide all controversies, then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes are those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.

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.