The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen, r. Mar. 2014

p. xii Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you remember all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You remember episodes that you have not thought of for years and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.

p. 19 I walk up and down through the empty hall examining everything carefully in the brightly lit cases, delighted to discover that there is absolutely nothing there that I would wish to own. I had spent forty years modestly collecting this kind of garbage and then, let us hope, grown wiser, the next twenty years giving it away.

p. 27 Into that chill building rushes a great warm, soft, languorous movement of tropical southern air that is simply amazing in its power to seduce. It is the sweet air of Brazil...

p. 46 My curiosity is too easily satisfied - or rather I have learned that the fascination of a strange place is centered in its people rather than in its views and monuments.

p. 76 Here is what is horrible about dying, I decide: not that you are obliterated by death but that everything you love is also obliterated. The eyes close for the last time, the brain deprived of oxygen comes unplugged, and everything, everything is destroyed, the world disintegrates - trees, lakes, mountains, children, wind and sunshine, the sea, canoes floating across tranquil rivers, ponds full of frogs, night and the stars, music and the music of silence.... [but] death destroys not only everything we love, but everything we hate as well. Our rages, our betrayals, our failures, our capacity for evil. It is all destroyed. How can death, then, be anything but a friend since so much more pain than joy is obliterated.

p. 83 And what suffering won't a man endure to live in his own hut on his own land, proud and half-mad with the delusion that to some extent he is in control of his own destiny.

p. 90 What is heaven for most of us if it is not the satisfaction of having worked hard for yourself, and of knowing that after you have eaten well that you will lie down, make love, and fall into the deep eight-hour sleep of total obliteration that you have earned?

p. 106 [Salvador] is a city where, underneath the normal pursuits, the people in it seem to be thinking of nothing else but their power to attract and of the great psychic charges that are going off between people in their most casual encounters. Connections are being made; people are looking at one another and with innocent delight.

p. 135 It is intensely moving to be in a city where everyone believes in God, and I consider joining them, not because I believe in God, but because, though the spectacle is depressing for its ritual, I believe in the emotion that has joined them together.

p. 171 If life has any meaning at all toward the end, it is certainly only in one's ability to draw from the well of memory a satisfying amount of intense experience to contemplate, for the things that are forgotten are only symbols for the parts of us that have already died. Part of the middle-class tragedy lies in the facility with which intense experience can be synthesized and bought.

p. 206 When I refuse to cook for them and drag them off to some restaurant to eat strange food that is past their comprehension, I feel a vague guilt now as though I were taking them to a pornographic movie that would by teaching perverse techniques confuse and complicate the pure, straightforward intensity of their romantic and passionate sensibilities.

p. 236 Are we not all born with a certain bias, an innate proclivity for feeling either that man is more good than bad or that he is more bad than good? This basic way of looking at mankind probably even determines the way we vote. Do we join a political party that demands more freedom to more nearly achieve our potential, or a party that wants more restrictive laws to curtail our evil instincts? Did I, who had always believed in more freedom, still believe in the face of the abuses that had been committed in its name?

p. 270 In a larger sense home, that symbol of stability, is only one more concept being shattered by a crazy world where whole nations are stood against the wall and where millions are driven to clog the roads as they stagger toward another border and a temporary haven. There is no way to buy or beg continuity; there is no spot on earth from which one may not be driven. Home is where you are; home is where you find yourself. (Reading that sentence over and giving it a double meaning I note with a glow of pride that we have arrived at the edge of profundity.) It is that cubic space that the body claims - if roofed, that area where you store your dirty clothes and your books.

p. 273 Man is most godlike when he sweats; the potential moral beauty of man lies in this simplest of things; man doing well something that he loves doing - the juggler juggling, the baker baking bread, the teacher before a class of children; a farmer hoeing out a row of corn. Even the trained killer who kills well fulfills, in some inscrutable way, his deepest contract with life and forgets for a time his own mortality, that stinking death that awaits him, too.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, r. Mar. 2013

p. 14 It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. 

p. 85 ...that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.

p. 132 We don't think of ourselves as citizens - parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.

p. 159 I don't remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards. I never did anything, but at the same time I could normally never sit still and become aware of what was really going on.

p. 226 If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

p. 231 ...gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.... there is no audience.

p. 234 In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts.

p. 291 It's not just that real memory is fragmentary; I think it's also that overall relevance and meaning are conceptual, while the experiential bits that get locked down and are easiest, years later, to retrieve tend to be sensory.

p. 440 It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

p. 458 Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

p. 548 Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

p. 3b It is possible to see the federal government as a parasite feeding on the lifeblood of the taxpayer. But blood is made to circulate, to replenish; it moves or there is death.

p. 7b I do not much care whether you like me - I myself dislike storytellers whose chief concern is that they themselves be liked or thought a clever storyteller.

p. 24b The more extraneous choices, the more hidden the real thing.

The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson, r. Oct. 2012

p. xiii And here is one more circumstance on which I often reflect: as a child I could in theory have spoken to old men who visited you at Walden Pond when they were children of the same age. Thus only one living memory separates us. At the cabin site even that seems to visit.

p. xxi When you stripped your outside obligations to the survivable minimum, you place your trained and very active mind in an unendurable vacuum. And this is the essence of the matter: in order to fill the vacuum, you discovered the human proclivity to embrace the natural world.

p. 102 The somber archaeology of vanished species has taught us the following lessons: -The noble savage never existed. -Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse. -Paradise found is paradise lost. Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own short-term survival.

p. 151 Moral reasoning is not a cultural artifact invented for convenience. It is and always has been the vital glue of society, the means by which transactions are made and honored to ensure survival. Every society is guided by ethical precepts, and every one of its members is expected to follow moral leadership and ethics-based tribal law.

p. 152 The first step is to turn away from claims of inherent moral superiority based on political ideology and religious dogma. The problems of the environment have become too complicated to be solved by piety and an unyielding clash of good intentions.

Valparaiso by Don DeLillo, r. Mar. 2012

p. 23 Interviewer: But not completely subhuman. Not some furry coupling designed to reproduce the beaver species so they can fell their trees and build their beaver dams to whatever mysterious ecological end and deep personal satisfaction.

p. 67 Delfina: But all the sexier, yes, in you body-hugging briefs. Teddy knows it's true. Each life so dense and rich. And the lives of the guests.

p. 70 Livia: Yes, I do, in my compact car, stopped in traffic somewhere, with my life sort of bug-stuck on the windshield.

p. 71 Livia: I'm a little bit of everything around me. Who am I. But completely separate at the same time. I'm whoever it is that has my memories. I'm part my mother, my father, my husband, my son. Part my car, my house. My dog if we had a dog. My hometown, a whole lot. But completely someone separate. I used to be a little knock-kneed. My father called me a knock-kneed creature of the earth. That's who I am.

p. 83 Delfina: Do not disappear off camera. Michael. Or none of this will have happened. Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

p. 97 Michael: Why do you need to know? Delfina caresses him lightly from behind. Delfina: Because we can't stop needing. Because everything's disposable.

p. 101 Delfina: Waxed or unwaxed. Because this is what we need to know.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, r. Jan. 2012

p. 244 Knowles seems to be one of these people who view the world's inconveniences as specific and personal, and it makes my stomach hurt to watch him.

p. 317 In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, r. Jul. 2011

p. 66 In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his works. The churches were the center of the social and intellectual life of the times. The figure of God was big in the hearts of men.

 p. 79 Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing that was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-night forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about him.