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.”

There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib, r. Apr. 2025

p. 8 Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian. And my father was a man who enjoyed a meal.

p. 20 This is a miracle of the past – one that many young folks might not have the opportunity to indulge in now. Hearing word of something, someone, some brewing storm. Hearing before seeing, building up the myth before confirming it.

p. 33 And this barber told me never to pull the gray weeds from the dark garden, for they might simply grow back with a newfound ferocity. An anger at their removal, he told me. You don't want to make an enemy out of the grays, he told me one day, while lining me up. Best to just thank them for showin' up to the party. Lucky you got a party for them to show up to.

p. 34 Lord, release me from whatever might make me wish for the way I looked as a child, which I can hardly remember through this beautiful fog of mortality, this slow march to the kingdom.

p. 52 The heart doesn't break all at once. It would be easier that way, cleaner. The process of breaking begins somewhere many of us can't even recall. It accelerates in bursts throughout a life; sometimes it hums along at its steady pace. But with the accumulation of enough pain and the promise of more to come, we can only carry ourselves so far.

p. 63 I have sat at the feet of poets who told me that there is power in withholding. In not offering the parts of yourself that people are most eager to see.

p. 74 Look, I love you and so I must tell you that anything that can be taken, will be taken. You are lucky if it is sudden. You are lucky if you survive the forest of reaching hands.

p. 90 I don’t remember when Brookhaven High School closed, though I remember wondering what they were going to do with all of the trophies, all of the banners. If they’d just be gone forever. I remember thinking that there is no success that can stop a school from closing, a building from being emptied out, encased by tall, unkempt weeds. Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

p. 112 I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all.

p. 150 But if you didn’t mind shrinking, becoming invisible in the terror of the slowly descending hours, it was good to have claim to a corner that was yours and yours alone. A king remains a king, no matter how paltry the square footage of their realm.

p. 160 Luck isn’t always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close. What doesn’t get you glory but what has also never done you wrong.

p. 174 I am of a particular emotional makeup, and because of this, I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough. By this I mean that I get it. The sun dances from behind the gray, and I want the warmth. The trees are trying to fight back to life, and I root for them. But then, I think, what will become of this misery that I've held? That I've kept for myself, that I've made my own? I know my way around this. I want to keep the familiar as much as I want to run toward whatever newness arrives. I want to wallow in the memory, in the reality of what I know.

p. 225 I like a long, aimless road trip for how it flirts with the act of leaving but never fully commits. You get to try on the outfits of different sunrises through a car window for however long you want, and then you return to the familiar colors of where you are, where your things are...

p. 227 I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.

p. 316 And it is both beautiful and heartbreaking to imagine this, that we go on living while a past version of ourselves remains locked, peacefully, in a euphoric dream. What I have been asking, the door I have been pawing at this entire time, is for a reimagining of eternity. A reversal, perhaps. Not that our happiest, freest selves are fastened to a dream, while we exit and return to the living world. But that our exit is where the dreaming begins, and our real, actual living is the place where we remain at our most joyous, time moving forward by small inches, each of us growing only seconds older with each passing year. 

Real Americans by Rachel Khong, r. Apr. 2025

Page 9 I followed his gaze to the New York City street, where nothing appeared out of the ordinary: people, pigeons, bags of trash. Holding the bagel steady, the father’s mind traveled elsewhere. It was a look I remembered my mother wearing when I was a child—one I resented. How dare she think of anything but me?

Page 9 On the four blocks to the office I dodged tourists wearing backpacks and bucket hats, holding red bags from the discount designer store. They moved slowly, their faces stupid with awe. I walked fast, with purpose, gripping the cup of coffee, which burned through its cardboard sleeve, proud to be inured to a cityscape that instilled marvel in everyone else.

Page 28 We were halfway through our second bottle of wine, a Napa cabernet, and I washed the venison down with it. The wine felt drying on my tongue, perfect to chase the butter and meat, making me want more of both.

Page 36 Both were geneticists. But to my father, science was a job. He had friends and other interests. Whereas my mother was a scientist like someone might be a painter—wholly, and obsessively. It was her entire life.

Page 45 I wasn’t not drunk. The world around me was fuzzy and golden. It was a new year. That always made me a little bit sad. As though something were wrong with the old one.

Page 47 “I hate that I need to sell it. I would paint for nothing, you know? But I have to live. In art as a product there is no longer patience, or presence—only commodity.”

Page 92 When we tried to catch up there was oddly little to say. He could summarize the past two years, and I could do the same, in a matter of sentences. It should have required more—recounting the time—and yet I could have said more about my day than I could two years.

Page 96 She took me to her lab when I was nine, I told Matthew. I realized I’d never shared this story with anyone. I was still ashamed. It had happened so long ago and should have been absorbed into the comprehensible past—a tellable anecdote, like any other story from my childhood—as distant as myth. And yet, perhaps because I hadn’t aired it, it felt recent, and painful. She’d hoped that I’d fall in love with the work of becoming a research scientist, the way she once had. She’d hoped I might be seduced, as she had. But to me, the fact that everything was invisible rendered it nonexistent. It was terribly simple of me. All I saw were hands in blue gloves, pipetting clear liquids into petri dishes—I couldn’t make sense of it. I must have seemed bored. I must not have asked the questions she wished I would ask. Afterward, when I begged to get ice cream, she said no, that we were going home. She was like a child who had been refused, and was lashing out. And like that, we were both upset. I knew, then, that I had disappointed her irrevocably. I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life. Now I thought it was naïve of her, too, to believe that particular moment—me so young, displaying a child’s typical response—represented anything. I remembered so clearly the disappointment on her face, the fear that I would never amount to anything—anything significant, anyway. And to date, she was right: I hadn’t. I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her. She had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.

Page 103 When the other Lily said brunch I had pictured a crowded, shared table, elbow to elbow with hungover New Yorkers wearing sunglasses, prattling in an attempt to keep night-before regrets at bay. This wasn’t that. We met at a hotel—her suggestion. She was in the lounge area when I arrived. She stood and gave me a bony, floral hug.

Page 108 At the bottom of the staircase, two women greeted us, beaming—our stewardesses. They looked cold, with their thin-stockinged legs. I’d always thought gams was an odd word to mean “legs,” but their legs—long like arms—looked exactly like gams.

Page 112 Somehow, though of course all this had been finely calibrated by people doing invisible work. The steel refrigerator was without smudges, the beds tautly made. The fridge was bare but for glass bottles of sparkling water, inert as bowling pins.

Page 112 “Is this what you expected?” he asked, and I had to laugh. How could I have known to imagine this?

Page 113 His Florida was so different from the one I had known. Gleaming and polished, not mossy and mildewing. The condo was too high for the mosquitoes to reach us.

Page 119 Hans stuck his slobbery goatee into one of my hands, and I petted him with the other. I liked meeting dogs and children, with their low expectations.

Page 127 Matthew’s brother, Thomas, should have been the one to take over. He’d planned to study medicine. But he was gone—forever nineteen, younger than Matthew was now. Matthew’s eyes grew wet.

Page 130 On the Fourth, the family’s fisherman friend stopped by with a cooler of seafood and a box of live lobsters, who scratched at the cardboard from inside with rubber-banded claws. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to die. They didn’t want to be in a box. They had no idea that death was even on the table.

Page 210 In the mornings, John and I watched the sky shift, to pink, then blue, or more often gray, which was how it stayed most days, beyond the trees, silver as a shell. The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.

Page 222 This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.

Page 225 “Just do your best,” my mother had said in the morning. Even college was optional, she insisted. “You don’t have to go to college just because everyone else is.” Often she said this when she noticed how late I stayed up to study. What mattered was that I found what I loved to do, she said. At some point. There was no rush when it came to that, either. I appreciated what she was trying to do—other kids’ parents pressured them to fulfill their own forfeited childhood dreams—at the same time it annoyed me. It did matter to me. I wanted to do well in the conventional ways—having no other metrics, not knowing how else to measure myself.

Page 244 Slow down, I said to my heart. In biology we’d watched an animation of the organ: It looked tortured, writhing with every beat. It was so weird, that a heart could just go on beating—the same one—for years, until it stopped.

Page 262 From my seat, I refreshed my email. It was embarrassing, to feel the hope rise up and then, immediately, evaporate. A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly.

Page 272 It was only after seeing the trees here, I realized, that I could describe what home was like.

Page 280 “You’re being a fucking idiot,” he said. “Be hurt if you want to. Sometimes I think you like it, being sad. It gives you, like, a personality.

Page 298 As a child I had learned the names of trees and birds and reptiles from paperback field guides. Now I could take a photo of anything—a beetle, a shrub—and be informed, within seconds, what it was. There was no need to wait or write down a question for later. It was a paradox: Though the results came quickly, hours passed easily this way.

Page 303 Campus was eerie, empty. Snow began to fall. I remembered, as a kid, seeing snow for the first time—my surprise that snowflakes actually looked as advertised. I’d expected they would be like the sun: drawn one way in childish pictures but more boring in real life.

Page 310 I’d seen her at Commons on occasion, eating with her friends. She never noticed me. Rarely in groups did you notice those who were alone. It only worked the other way around.

Page 316 I took my phone out of my pocket and scrolled: friends’ vacations and dinners, graphics about police brutality, raccoons joyfully eating watermelon. I could feel her eyes on me, judging my phone use. It was irritating.

Page 318 My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.

Page 340 “Earth to Nick,” she sometimes said to me. “You’re not here. You’re in your head.” “Where should I be?” I’d ask. And she would take my hand in hers: warm, physical, alive. “Be here,” she’d say. “With me.”

Page 391 It’s sad that I’m dying, but why doesn’t it work in reverse? Do you ever think, how sad it is that when I was alive, you weren’t yet born? All those interesting years you missed out on.

Page 395 Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.

Page 359 I wonder if you can understand this: that the way I loved her was different from the way she wanted to be loved. Every day of my life – and there are not many more now – I will regret this.

Page 363  She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn't. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age. But she had never wanted to be remarkable. Her life was small, and rich, and entirely hers. She had Nick. She had the women friends she played mahjong with and fellow swimmers from the pool. Children from the day care, where she worked; patients at the hospice center, where she volunteered. Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable —more remarkable-for the fact of differences. Friendship didn't require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.

Page 370 Whenever Betty needed something, her granddaughter seemed inconvenienced, acted as though Betty were interrupting her very important life. Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another's lives – that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up living like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Page 371 At times I feel like a bird, trailing in the wake of the younger and faster. I feel my bones losing their density, becoming hollow and avian.

No One's Home by D.M. Pulley, r. Nov. 2024

p. 46 The plight of all children hung from his awkward shoulders, always being dragged somewhere they’d rather not go by forces beyond their control. Like luggage.

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.

Home Game by Michael Lewis, r. Sep. 2018

p. 24 One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the compulsion to have a purpose in life. People are forever asking why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer. The least naturally ambitious people can have ambition thrust upon them in this way. Once you've established yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly impossible to just go somewhere and screw off.

p. 26 "Assimilation" is just another word for acquiring a bit of the local status.

p. 73 The fact, as opposed to the theory, of life with a small child is an amoral system of bribes and blackmails. You do this for me, you get that. You don't do this for me, you don't get that. I've always assumed that if a small child has enough joy and love and stability in her life, along with intelligently directed bribes and blackmail, the rest will take care of itself.

p. 78 The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you don't want to, maybe especially when you don't want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. "Have you ever owned a dog?" he said. And that's the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation.

p. 101 How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.

p. 135 A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness.

p. 163 After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

Life Before Life by Jim Tucker, r. Dec. 2015

p. 195 Science is very conservative, and its stability rests on the idea that new understandings of the world must fit in with the previous knowledge about it. Biologist E. O. Wilson has used the term "consilience" to describe this, the "jumping together" of knowledge when facts and theories from different areas link and form a common foundation of knowledge. As he says, "the explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another."

p. 224 The idea of the emotional connection, but not the roles, enduring across lifetimes can affect the way that parents look at their children, because it suggests that parents need to provide discipline for their children, not in a domineering or harsh way, but as guidance for fellow travelers. Children can be seen as equal partners sharing life's journey instead of inferior beings, even though they are partners that need direction and need to feel a sense of security that their parents are in control.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, r. Dec. 2014

p. 6 …children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.

p. 20 And then, back in February, I found a letter from Matt waiting for me when I got home from work on Friday evening. I saw the writing and instantly I saw Matt - you know how handwriting conjures up the person.

p. 144 It was getting dark, and the cold was creeping in with the night. Matt told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you'd just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.

p. 196 The research I love. It calls for patience, precision, and a methodical approach, and all of those I have. That makes it sound dull, but it is far from full. On a pure level, it allows you to feel that you have added your own tiny piece to the jigsaw of scientific knowledge.

p. 241 Things change. Everyone has to grow up. But not grow apart, as we had done, surely?

p. 243 Daniel remarked… that [the backwoods of northern Ontario] seemed an unlikely environment to have produced an academic. That irritated me. Surely the most unlikely place to produce an academic is a city, with its noise and confusion and lack of time for thought or contemplation?

p. 259 That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it's the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones. Partly, too, it is the sensation of going back in time, moving from "now" to "then," and the recognition that wherever you are now and wherever you may be in the future, nothing alters the point you started from.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, r. Aug. 2014

p. ix Growing up was easy. It required no though or effort on my part. It was going to happen anyway. So what follows isn't terribly eventful, I'm afraid. And yet it was by a very large margin the most fearful, thrilling, interesting, instructive, eye-popping, lustful, eager, troubled, untroubled, confused, serene, and unnerving time of my life.

p. 29 So this is a book about being small and getting larger slowly. One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World - five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable - it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges, r. Apr. 2014

p. 296 A glance at the comparatively recent history of witchcraft in England, Europe, and America should persuade one not to judge the On a too harshly. They were in the act of taking, in one generation or less, the stride from prehistoric man to a civilization that has taken us thousands of years to accomplish, if we can be said to have accomplished it yet.

p. 336 Across leagues of wooded hills up the forty-mile length of Lake Kami, Talimeoat and I gazed long and silently towards a glorious sunset. I knew that he was searching the distance for any sign of smoke from the camp-fires of friends or foes. After a while his vigilance relaxed and, lying near me, he seemed to become oblivious to my presence. Feeling the chill of evening, I was on the point of suggesting a move, when he heaved a deep sigh and said to himself, as softly as an On a could say anything:

"Yak haruin. ("My country.")

That sigh followed by those gentle words, so unusual for one of his kind - was it caused by a vision of the not far distant future, when the Indian hunter would roam his quiet woods no more; when the light wraith from his camp fire would five place to the smoke from saw-mills; when throbbing engines and hooting sirens would shatter for ever the age-old silence?

p. 343 I vividly recall a dance to which I was invited by some friends. From among the onlookers, I watched the couples waltzing. I had never before seen men and women in evening dress. This was supposed to be a children's ball, yet a great many of those children were quite grown up. The girls, with their radiant faces and their brightly colored, not too abundant clothing, looked magically beautiful to me. With the music and the lights, they dazzled me - and made me sad. I realized, for the first time, how much grace and gaiety I had missed; pleasures of early manhood that would never come to me again. I saw then that, right through life, I should be unlike other men; unable to throw myself whole-heartedly into such a joyous party as I was then watching. Yet, as my thoughts turned from civilization to the snowy forests and windswept heights of my native land, I echoed the words of Adam Lindsay Gordon's dying jockey: "I'd live the same life over if I had to live it again."

p. 513 When I was demobilized in January, 1919, I took a short lease of a house four miles from Despard's home; and happy indeed I was with my precious little wife and [our daughter] Stephanie. We had three acres of land and a car. But life was too easy. That thrice-accursed - or thrice-blessed - wanderlust was on me and I could not rest in such peaceful surroundings. The only work I felt fitted for was breaking new trails; reclaiming unused land; and the thought of the thousands of leagues in distant parts of the world, unpeopled and producing nothing, continually troubled me.

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.

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.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, r. Nov. 2013

p. xvi I learned - from actors and from audiences - how to shape a scene, how to build tension, and - above all - the necessity of being harsh with your own material, excising or rewriting anything that doesn't work. I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn...

p. xx Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along- the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.

p. xx Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.

p. xxiv Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

p. xxv The "true" story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

p. 35 "As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, and empire."

p. 35 "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."

p. 108 "But they made him a commander and so he has to act like one. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's winning, but that scares him worst of all, because he doesn't know why he's winning, except that I have something to do with it. Any minute somebody could find out that Rosen isn't some magic Israeli general who can win no matter what. He doesn't know why anybody wins or loses. Nobody does."