Centennial by James Michener, r. May 2026

p. 10 That's why we stay in business – facts are important to us, but understandings are vital. We inject a high percentage of understandings in our rag and we're asking you to help us on our next big project.

p. 42 [The Pawnee Buttes] were extraordinary, these two sentinels of the plains. Visible for miles in each direction, they guarded a bleak and silent empire.

p. 70 Mammals, unlike reptiles, had some capacity for memory, and as the trek to the northwest continued, the chestnut felt sorrow and the loss if his mate and the colt, but the recollection did not last long, and he was soon preoccupied with the problems of the journey.

p. 103 The vast plains had a nobility that would never diminish, for they were a challenge, with their duststorms, their wild blizzards, their tornadoes and their endless promise, if men treated them with respect. They were a resource inexhaustible in their variety but demanding in their love. In they years ahead they would terrify easterners and Europeans afraid of loneliness, but they would be a haven for all who understood them, and they would be loved in contrary ways and with harsh curses. The great plains – illimitable in both challenge and fulfillment.

p. 160 There was the tamed elk, too, that stayed about the camp in the north and the sounds of coyotes along the Arkansas when [the Arapaho] were planning to fight the Comanche, and the sandy places where the children played. They had possessed a universe of endless horizons and sunsets blazing with golden fire.

p. 275 They spent a good deal of time dissecting what a girl like Elly, an orphan with no prospects and less than mediocre looks, would have to do to catch a man like one of the rich Zendts, and Laura Lou concluded, "I think men like to be loved. Just loved."

p. 303 ...and in that moment the Zendts knew what moving west meant – the awful loneliness, the burden of rifles, the strange rivers flowing swift with mud, the unknown Indians lurking, the long, long trails with no homes and no lights at dusk. They had barely started; over half the continent lay ahead...

p. 482 Nate asked, 'Are they givin' that [14-year-old] boy whiskey?' and Poteet said, 'Three things a man's got to learn to handle – a gun, a glass of whiskey, and a girl. He don't learn by readin'.'

p. 493 In these last days Jim had his first good chance to study the plains of Colorado, and everything he saw pleased him: the golden-brown color, the gently rising sweeps, the hidden swales, the rounded hills, the limitless horizon darkening at the edges, and day after day of cloudless sky, an arc of blue enclosing an untouched paradise.

p. 494 God, he wished he could ride forever with these men. Just keep riding toward some distant horizon behind which the Comanche and the Kansans and the unfordable rivers lay. But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.

p. 584 'Back east, wherever you look, you see something. The world crowds in on you. I can't tell you how homesick I got for the prairies, where a man can look for miles and not see anything ... not feel crowded. Out here the human being is important ... not a lot of trees and buildings.'

p. 619 She cut him off. 'Here in Chicago it doesn't matter if you're an Indian. Life is better when no one knows who you are.' The bleakness of such reasoning was so contrary to the warm love he had known on that Texas farm with his mother, and so alien to the friendships he had experienced on the trail north with Poteet that he could not accept it. 'You must come home. Where people love you,' he pleaded.

p. 622 Life in western America had a majesty, and the memory of it possessed her.

p. 733 ...and the character of a society depends more upon what men thing of themselves than upon what they really are.

p. 828 'The earth gives you nothing, Morgan. It simply sits there and waits. It neither loves you nor hates you, but it does cooperate with men who are not afraid.'

p. 853 Garrett had assembled various theories about this American preference for isolation. When a Pilgrim was thrown onto the shore at Plymouth he faced only wilderness, and from it each man had chopped out his own little kingdom. He had to wrestle with loneliness, learn to live with it and overcome it. If he could not do this, he could not survive. Traipsing off to the town meeting was not the basic characteristic of New England life; it was going back afterward to the loneliness of one's own cottage.

p. 864 Masterpieces are like that; they require an active participation and offer nothing to those who are unwilling to contribute.

p. 908 'I could live anywhere in America ... anywhere in the world, I suppose ... But I keep livin' in that old clapboard house my grandpappy built. You know why? A man needs roots. Specially a singin' man tryin' to catch at the heart of people. He needs to know where his pappy worked and which families his mom did washin' for. When he walks down the street it's got to be his street....'

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, r. Nov. 2024

 p. 12 His mind, and the minds of his small companions in that leather-walled schoolroom, was far away, but in a world, not of prophets, but of swopped marbles, birds' eggs, wooden daggers, secrets and catapults, midnight feasts, heroes, deadly rivalries and desperate friendships.

p. 76 And then he felt something more thrilling than the warm kiss of the sun on the back of his neck: it was a reedy flight of cold April air across his face – something perilous and horribly exciting – something very shrill, that whistled through his qualmy stomach and down his thighs.

p. 93 It had been a difficult time for [Bellgrove] since he first put on the Zodiac gown of high office. Was he winning or losing his fight for authority? He longed for respect, but he loved indolence also. Time would tell whether the nobility of his august head could become the symbol of his leadership. To tread the corridors of Gormenghast the acknowledged master of staff and pupil alike! He must be wise, stern, yet generous. He must be revered. That was it... revered. But did this mean that he would be involved in extra work...? Surely, at his age...?

p. 96 Bellgrove came to with a start. He looked about him with the melancholy grandeur of a sick lion. Then he found his mouth was open, so he closed it gradually, for he would not have them think that he would hurry himself for anyone.

p. 133 Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.

p. 135 'I have no idea,' he said. 'No idea whatsoever, as to what it can be to which you are referring.' His words could not have sounded heavier or less honest. He must have felt this himself, for he added, 'Not an inkling, I assure you.'

p. 148 With the nightmare memory of his recent adventure filling his mind he moved in a trance, waking from time to time to wonder at this new manifestation of life's incalculable strangeness – the little box ahead of him, the sunshine playing over the head of Gormenghast Mountain, where it rose, with unbelievable solidity, ahead, like a challenge, on the skyline.

p. 264 And Titus watching longed with his whole being to be anonymous – to be lost within the core of such a breed – to be able to live and run and fight and laugh and if need be, cry, on his own. For to be one of those wild children would have been to be alone among companions. As the Earl of Gormenghast he could never be alone. He could only be lonely.

p. 269 And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

p. 405 [Countess Gertrude's] brain began to go to sleep again. She had lost interest in it and the things that it could do. It had been brought forth like a machine from the darkness and set in motion – and it had proved itself to be measured and powerful, like the progress of an army on the march. But it now chose to halt. It chose to sleep again.

p. 407 It was when he saw the great walls looming above him that he began to run. He ran as though to obey an order. And this was so, though he knew nothing of it. He ran in the acknowledgement of a law as old as the laws of his home. The law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth. The law that separates the generations, that draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both. And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.