The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane, r. Oct. 2015

p. 52 The youth looked keenly at the ashen face [of the dead soldier]. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

p. 70 As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleaming on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.

p. 128 He did not give a great deal of thought to these battles that lay directly before him. It was not essential that he should plan his ways in regard to them. He had been taught that many obligations of a life were easily avoided. The lessons of yesterday had been that retribution was a laggard and blind. With these facts before him he did not dream it necessary that he should become feverish over the possibilities of the ensuing twenty-four hours. He could leave much to chance.

p. 199 A changed tide tried to force them southward, but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.

p. 308 The autumn smote the leaves, and the trees of Whilomville were panoplied in crimson and yellow. The winds grew stronger, and in the melancholy purple of the nights the home shine of a window became a finer thing. The little boys, watching the sear and sorrowful leaves drifting down from the maples, dreamed of the near time when they could heap bushels in the streets and burn them during the abrupt evenings.

Pillar of Sand by Sandra Postel, r. Oct. 2015

p. 237 ...look for what works rather than what is theoretically correct, and do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale, r. Sep. 2015

p. 19 I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking…

p. 77 Almost without noticing it, I slipped into the routine that was to become my life. Early morning had a familiar sound for I was regularly awakened by a rooster just before dawn. I would lie there relaxed for a little, thinking how lucky I was to look forward to a day which was going to bring me nothing but satisfaction.

p. 141 I remember thinking, too, how vastly different their lives were going to be from mine once their pleasant cruise was over. Even when they reached Apia in Samoa there would be bright lights (of a sort), cars, busy streets, cinemas, hotels; so-called luxuries which, however desirable, exacted their own price in tensions, problems, congested humanity.

p. 215 I would get up in the morning, put on my pareu, brew my coffee and suddenly reflect that by rights I should be in a pair of long trousers, jangling a bunch of keys ready to open the store. I had escaped! That was the overwhelming sensation, that was what made those early days so unbelievably wonderful and precious: I had cheated authority, fate, life itself, and all by a miracle.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, r. Sep. 2015

p. 16 Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

p. 54 Under a row of pear trees - once an orchard? - I laid me down and idled, an art perfected during my long convalescence. An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.

p. 55 Vyvyan spurns praise, both giving and receiving it. He says, 'If people praise you, you're not walking your own path.'

p. 61 I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. "Liberality? Timidity in the rich!" "Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed" "Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception." What sort of state does he want? "None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."

p. 75 Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

p. 86 Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying good-bye.

p. 177 I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

p. 225 I play Go against my sony, I said. "To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?" The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

p. 227 Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.

p. 235 the vacant (movie theater) was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite contured thru a lens when your grandfather's grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but [movies] enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces. Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say.

p. 265 So many feelin's I'd got I din't have room 'nuff for 'em. Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'ankin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.

p. 303 So, I asked 'gain, is it better to be savage'n to be Civ'lized? List'n, savages and Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs.

p. 326 All revolutions are [fantasy and lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

p. 331 Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata.

p. 344 My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.

p. 349 As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

p. 362 She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

p. 363 It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

p. 387 ...but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

p. 449 ...nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. Can scarcely recall the name of a single sight. By the itinerary's finale, the great clock tower, my jaw was hurting from all the yawns I'd suppressed.

p. 470 People are obscenities. Would rather by music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

Night by Elie Wiesel, r. Aug. 2015

p. 2 [Moishe the Beadle] explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. "Man raises himself to God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them."

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon, r. Aug. 2015

p. 340 The rest of the world was busy feeding itself, country by country, to the furnace, but while the city's newspapers and newsreels at the Trans-Lux were filled with ill portents, defeats, atrocities, and alarms, the general mentality of the New Yorker was not one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows. The economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but of perceptible movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America.

p. ? Though she had worked partly from a photograph this time, the details of Joe's body and face were filled in from memory, a process she had found challenging and satisfying. You had to know your lover very well - to have spent a lot of time looking at him and touching him - to be able to paint his picture when he was not around. The inevitable mistakes and exaggerations she had made struck her now as proofs, artifacts, of the mysterious intercourse of memory and love.

p. ? The Antarctic Waldorf was heated by a gasoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne because of the legend FT. WAYNE IRON WORKS INDIANA USA stamped on its side. The naming madness that came over men when they arrived here in the unmapped blankness seeped quickly into every corner of their lives. They named the radios, the latrine, they named their hangovers and cuts on their fingers.

Although Of Course In The End You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky, r. Aug. 2015

All quotes are by David Foster Wallace unless noted

p. 3 As if how good a writer you are and how good a teacher you are have anything to do with each other. I don't think so. I know too many really good writers who are shitty teachers, and vice versa, to think that. I think that the teaching... well, the teaching has helped my own writing a lot...

p. 16 ...somebody who's writing, has part of their motivation to sort of I think impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There's an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something - much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it.

p. 36 My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.

p. 41 ...if the writer does his job right, what he basically does in remind the reader of how smart the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

p. 69 And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.

p. 85 The problem is [TV]'s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food.

p. 180 Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like - there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older. Who's written something, or won some tournament, that you particularly admire.

p. 199 Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what's coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything's going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won't in any way challenge you.

p. 203 I mean that's probably ultimately why novels and movies have it over short stories, as on art form. Is that if the heart of the short story is dishonest, there aren't enough of the little flashes to keep you going. Whereas in a novel or a movie, even if the central project doesn't work, there are often ten or fifteen great, great, great things.

p. 266 [On his landscape (outside Bloomington), the long fields] When the wind blows, you can see ripples, it's like water. It's like the ocean, except it's really green. I mean, it really is. Not so much here. But you get another mile south, where it's nothing but serious full-time farmland and farmhouses? Sort of calm, real pretty.

p. 290 Today's person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise you humanity in that kind of exchange? Versus fifty years ago, when the big thing was, I don't know that, havin' a house and a garden and driving ten miles to your light industrial job. And livin' and dyin' in the same town that you're in, and knowing what other towns looked like only from photographs and the occasional movie reel. I mean, there's just so much that seems different, and the speed with which it gets different is just...

p. 291 I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.

p. 294 Nice to have your borders redefined, though, by physical contact with another person... I'm not just a set of anxieties and ambitions. I'm a person confined to a limited range, realize your head is only a half-foot-long space, etc.   - David Lipsky on physical relations with your significant other

p. 307 It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you.