The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, r. Mar. 2026

p. 65 So we did what we had to do [in Hungary, pre-WWII]. We had fun. We played. We got drunk and danced from one war to the next. What else were we supposed to do? We all knew that the wonderful world that had been built for us was coming to an end. So our games were urgent. Necessary. We simply had to have fun. There was nothing else for us. Because we knew what was coming. I don't know how, we just did. All of us. Men and women. Rich and poor. Jews and goyim. All knew. So we behaved like children and did what children do best. Pretend that there was nothing wrong and continue to play. The world would have to take care of itself.

p. 198 You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man).

p. 221 "Gods are a biological necessity," he said to me on a particularly warm night at his home in Georgetown, during that last summer when he could still get around on crutches, "as integral to our species as language or opposable thumbs." According to [John von Neumann], faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely; and it was this lack, this profound loss, that now had to be addressed by science. "We have no guiding star," he told me, "nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us."

p. 271 "Our earthly existence, since it in itself has a very doubtful meaning, can only be a means towards a goal of another existence. The idea that everything in the world has a meaning is, after all, precisely analogous to the principle that everything has a cause, on which the whole of science rests." – Kurt Gödel, letter to his mother

p. 350 "After that, I [Lee Sedol] continued playing but I had already decided to retire. With the debut of AI, I've realized that I cannot be at the top, even if I make a spectacular comeback and return to being the number one player through frantic efforts. Even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, r. Feb. 2018

p. 8 Julie seemed unimpressed, and in reviewing the interaction later, I realized that Gene must have lied to her about his reason for not being present. This was presumably to protect Julie from feeling that her lecture was unimportant to Gene and to provide a justification for a less prestigious speaker being sent as a substitute. It seems hardly possible to analyze such a complex situation involving deceit and supposition of another person's emotional response, and then prepare your own plausible lie, all while someone is waiting for you to reply to a question. Yet that is exactly what people expect you to be able to do.

p. 48 "The human brain is wired to focus on differences in its environment - so it can rapidly discern a predator. If I installed pictures or other decorative objects, I would notice them for a few days and then my brain would ignore them. If I want to see art, I go to the gallery. The paintings there are of higher quality, and the total expenditure over time is less than the purchase price of cheap posters."

p. 57 I had seen the view when I bought the apartment. It did not change much in different conditions. And the only times I just sat were when I was waiting for an appointment or if I was reflecting on a problem, in which case interesting surroundings would be a distraction.

p. 60 Although my parents continued to make routine, ritual contact, it was my assessment that they had lost interest in me some years ago. Their duty had been completed when I was able to support myself.

p. 61 "An image of Isis with an inscription: Sum omnia quae fuerunt suntque eruntque ego. 'I am all that has been, is, and will be.'" I hoped I had read the Latin correctly.

p. 110 Research consistently shows that the risks to health outweigh the benefits of drinking alcohol. My argument is that the benefits to my mental health justify the risks. Alcohol seems to both calm me down and elevate my mood, a paradoxical but pleasant combination. And it reduces my discomfort in social situations.

p. 276 I need not be visibly odd. I could engage in the protocols that others followed and move undetected among them. And how could I be sure that other people were not doing the same - playing the game to be accepted but suspecting all the time that they were different?

p. 277 I had a great deal of valuable knowledge - about genetics, computers, aikido, karate, hardware, chess, wine, cocktails, dancing, sexual positions, social protocols, and the probability of a fifty-six-game hitting streak occurring in the history of baseball. I knew so much shit and I still couldn't fix myself.

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, r. Sep. 2016

p. 26 It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr Flay experienced twinges of pleasure.

p. 82 Through the door and into my secret attic. And here it is I am. I am here now. I have been here lots of times but that is in the past. That is over, but now I'm here it's in the present. This is the present. I'm looking on the roofs of the present and I'm leaning on the present window-sill and later on when I'm older I will lean on this window-sill again. Over and over again.

p. 96 When Mrs Slagg reached the cradle she put her fingers to her mouth and peered over it as though into the deepest recesses of an undiscovered world. There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours - dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.

p. 110 I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generations to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased. And this ceremony today, my very dear ladyships, is a result of my professional adroitness, ha, ha, ha, on the occasion of a brand new Groan.

p. 163 Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But this could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or deeds, to mimic.

p. 333 For every key position in the Castle there was the apprentice, either the son or the student, bound to secrecy. Centuries of experience had seen to it that there should be no gap in the steady, intricate stream of immemorial behaviour.

p. 412 The autumn and winter winds and the lashing rain storms and the very cold of those seasons, for all their barbarism, were of a spleen that voiced the heart. Their passions were allied to human passions - their cries to human cries. But it was otherwise with this slow pulp of summer, this drag of heat, with the incurious yellow eye within it, floating monotonously, day after day.

p. 422 A closer degree of intimacy had been established in the castle between whatever stood, lay, knelt, was propped, shelved, hidden or exposed, or left ready to use, animate or inanimate, within the castle walls. A kind of unwilling knowledge of the nearness of one thing with another - of one human, to another, though great walls might divide them - of nearness to a clock, or a banister, or a pillar or a book, or a sleeve. For Flay the horrible nearness to himself - to his own shoulder and hand. The out-pouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.

p. 445 ...and lifting his head he noticed how, with a deepening of the rose in the sky, all things were tinted, as though they had awaited the particular concentration of hue which the sky now held, before admitting the opinions of their separate colours to be altered or modified.

p. 455 The sickness was relieved, the sickness and the staleness of the summer day. The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together, the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin-pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds.

p. 460 The Doctor (for it was Prunesquallor) showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an eel set upon its end, while Irma, in white silk, had gone out of her way, it appeared, to exhibit to their worst advantage (her waist being ridiculously tight) a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac's cupboard.

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, r. Aug. 2016

p. 237 Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. - George Bernard Shaw

p. 244 The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. - Colin Wilson

p. 249 In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: The person who has more options has more power. Don't wait until you need options to search for them.

p. 269 It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. - Paul Theroux

p. 290 Like all innovators ahead of the curve, you will have frightening moments of doubt. Once past the kid-in-a-candy-store phase, the comparative impulse will creep in. The rest of the world will continue with its 9-5 grind, and you'll begin to question your decision to step off the treadmill. Common doubts and self-flagellation include the following:
1) Am I really doing this to be more free and leak a better life, or am I just lazy?
2) Did I quit the rat race because it's bad, or just because I couldn't hack it? Did I just cop out?
3) Is this as good as it gets? Perhaps I was better off when I was following orders and ignorant of the possibilities. It was easier at least.
4) Am I really successful or just kidding myself?
5) Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?
6) Why am I not happy? I can do anything and I'm still not happy. Do I even deserve it?

p. 297 The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. - Thich Nhat Hanh

p. 315 Money doesn't change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.

p. 332 Calvin Coolidge once said that nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent; I would add that the second most common is smart people who think their IQ or resume justifies delivering late.

The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, r. Feb. 2015

p. 23 They were pretty desperate times really, but home always looks better when you're away from it, and even more so through a haze of hash.

p. 65 Finding the appropriate entry in this most up-to-date but already well-worn copy of Halliwell's, Smith was tempted to highlight it now, prior to viewing the film. He resisted this impulse, reasoning that you had to actually watch the movie first. There were so many things that could happen to you. You could be disturbed by the phone or a knock at the door. The video could malfunction and chew up the tape. You could be struck down by a massive cardiac arrest. Such happenings were, he considered, equally unlikely for him, nonetheless he held to his superstition.

p. 84 There was always a tension in his mind and body; this was part and parcel of being a classical scholar in a world where the classics were undervalued. His depth and breadth of knowledge went unrecognized.

Light in August by William Faulkner, r. Jan. 2013

p. 25 "For money and excitement," Varner says. "Lucas ain't the first young buck that's throwed over what he was bred to do and them that depended on him for money and excitement."

p. 47 Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

p. 70 Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to do.

p. 253 But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you.

p. 289 Better than the musty offices where the lawyers waited lurking among ghosts of old lusts and lies, or where the doctors waited with sharp knives and sharp drugs, telling man, believing that he should believe, without resorting to printed admonishments, that they labored for that end whose ultimate attainment would leave them with nothing whatever to do. 

p. 331 It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

p. 467 Woman (not the seminary, as he had once believed): the Passive and Anonymous whom God had created to be not alone the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach.

p. 472 And the wife...liked him, admired him in a hushed, alarmed, secret way: his swagger, his bluff and simple adherence to a simple code.

p. 486 ...the faces of old men lined by that sheer accumulation of frustration and doubt which is so often the other side of the picture of hale and respected full years - the side, by the way, which the subject and proprietor of the picture has to look at, cannot escape looking at.

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, r. Jul. 2012

p. 94 I believe it was Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind who said that fortunes can be made only during the building up or tearing down of an empire, and Salazar certainly subscribed to that theory. In the so-called wolfram water, the Portuguese dictator had the last lycanthropic laugh.

p. 175 Still, Pasteur knew that luck explained just part of his success. As he himself declared, "Chance favors only the prepared mind."

p. 225 The desire for a great adventure and the love of riches are practically built into human nature. As such, history is dotted with innumerable gold rushes.

p. 260 A pathological science takes advantage of that caution. Basically, its believers use the ambiguity about evidence as evidence - claiming that scientists don't know everything and therefore there's room for my pet theory, too.

The Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White, r. Apr. 2012

p. 10 Steering a car toward home is a very different experience from steering a car toward a rostrum.
p. 47 I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
p. 97 No longer is a small town autonomous - it is a creature of the state and of the Federal Government.
p. 111 But I feel sadness at All Last Things, too, which is probably a purely selfish, or turned-in, emotion - sorrow not at my dog's death but at my own, which hasn't even occurred yet but which saddens me just to think about in such pleasant surroundings.
p. 127 Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
p. 135 "The trouble today," [de Madariaga] wrote, "is that the Communist world understands unity but not liberty, while the free world understands liberty but not unity. Eventual victory may be won by the first of the two sides to achieve the synthesis of both liberty and unity."
p. 147 ...so many million dollars spent on the idea that our trains and our motorcars should go fast and smoothly, and the child remembering, not the smoothness, but the great--big--BUMP.
p. 165 Men [nowadays] go to saloons to gaze at televised events instead of to think long thoughts.
p. 182 "She is at that enviable moment in life (I thought) when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start."
p. 185 The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change - and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.
p. 210 ...there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
p. 247 It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing.
p. 301 "This curious world which we inhabit is far more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used." He would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.
p. 303 Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
p. 323 [From Strunk] "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
p. 363 [From his Aunt Caroline in her nineties] 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the rememberance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive world.

Love In The Ruins by Percy Walker, r. Feb. 2012

p. 25 Was it not John Locke who said that the mark of genius is the ability to discern not this thing or that thing but rather the connection between the two?
p. 33 Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world.
p. 35 At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of self through ordeal.
p. 74 People are kind. They find it easy to forgive you in the name of tragedy or insanity and most of all if you are smart.
p. 148 Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same. The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.
p. 152 I feel like a one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.
p. 201 How can a man spend 45 years as a stranger to himself? No other creature would do such a thing. No animal would, for he is pure organism. No angel would, for he is pure spirit.
p. 321 "We'll live at Tara," says Lola past my arm in the prosaic casting-ahead voice of a woman planning tomorrow's meals.
p. 353 "Don't commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." "Which one is that?" "The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven you."
p. 360 Strange: I am older, yet there seems to be more time, time for watching and waiting and thinking and working.
p. 379 (last sentence) To bed we go for a long winter's nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong.