The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, r. Jan. 2016

p. 32 When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

p. 69 And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, and let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

p. 90 We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.

p. 100 Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, r. Mar. 2015

p. 25 We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

p. 50 All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary. The real question is how to prepare for the Enemy's counterattack.

p. 67 …active habits are strengthened be repitition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

p. 71 The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able te recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

p. 94 The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not anther self…. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same…. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility he calls love, and this monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is - or claims to be.

p. 101 If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more terrible punishments for those who fail - all this, pursued and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.

p. 112 You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours…. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as chattels.

p. 113 Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' thieir bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds…

p. 133 I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already.

p. 139 We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain - not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

p. 150 …the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing somenthing is not to make him do it.

p. 151 To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour - this would be rejected as unutterably single-minded.

p. 169 Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.

p. 203 The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised.

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, r. Mar. 2015

p. xvi The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyer and not an isolator. The ocean has been man's highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels, and cut roads through the virgin jungles.

p. 9 Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.

p. 22 Modern research demands that every branch shall dig its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.

p. 132 The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, r. Sep. 2014

p. 56 And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

p. 116 [Elizabeth-Jane] sat up with her mother to the utmost of her strength night after night. To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker way than to watch - to be a "waker," as the country-people call it. Between the hours at which the last toss-pot went by and the first sparrow shook himself, the silence in Casterbridge - barring the rare sound of the watchman - was broken in Elizabeth's ear only by the time-piece in the bedroom ticking frantically against the clock on the stairs; ticking harder and harder till it seemed to clang like a gong; and all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. Why they stared at her so helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that would release them from terrestrial constraint; what that chaos called consciousness, which spin in her at this moment like a top, tended to, and began in. Her eyes fell together; she was awake, yet she was asleep.

p. 157 "It's better to stay at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so!"

p. 172 The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.

p. 184 [The fortune teller] was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little and believe so much at his house, when at church they professed so much and believed so little.

p. 192 Nearly the whole town had gone into the fields. The Casterbridge populace still retained the primitive habit of helping one another in time of need; and thus, though the corn belonged to the farming section of the little community - that inhabiting the Durnover quarter - the remainder was no less interested in the labour of getting it home."

p. 231 "If I could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't keep a church choir at my own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times of my life. But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn't need what I could have, and now I be poor I can't have what I need!"

p. 317 And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him…. Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"

p. 332 …[Elizabeth-Jane] thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world.

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.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis, r. Mar. 2014

p. xvii …any writer has the right to look for "spices" in the work of any other writer, but the "final sauce" has to be of his or her own making.

p. 9 An uncle of mine, a canon with full prebend, liked to say that love of temporal glory was the perdition of souls, who should covet only eternal glory. To which another uncle, an officer in one of those old infantry regiments called terços, would retort that love of glory was the most truly human thing there was in a man and, consequently, his most genuine attribute.

p. 18 The minute that passes doesn't matter to time, only the minute that's coming. The minute that's coming is strong, merry, it thinks it carries eternity in itself and it carries death, and it perishes just like the other one, but time carries on.

p. 32 What was it that my old primary teacher wanted, after all? Memorization and behavior in the classroom. Nothing more, nothing less than what life, the final class, wants, with the difference that if you put fear into me, you never put anger.

p. 46 And that was how I disembarked in Lisbon and continued on to Coimbra. The university was waiting for me with its difficult subjects. I studied them in a very mediocre way, but even so I didn't lose my law degree. They gave it to me with all the solemnity of the occasion, following years of custom, a beautiful ceremony that filled me with pride and nostalgia - mostly nostalgia.

p. 53 The sensuality of boredom: memorize that expression, reader, keep it, examine it, and if you can't get to understand it you may conclude that you're ignorant of one of the most subtle sensations of this world and that time.

p. 58 Fear obscurity, Brás, flee from the negligible. Men are worth something in different ways, and the surest one of all is being worthy in the opinions of other men.

p. 86 So I, Brás Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the law of the equivalencies of windows, and I established the fact that the method of compensating for a closed window is to open another, so that morality can continuously aerate one's conscience.

p. 110 The world may have been too small for Alexander, but the eaves of a garret are an infinity for swallows. Take a look now at the neutrality of this globe that carries us through space like a lifeboat heading for shore: today a virtuous couple sleeps on the same plot of ground that once held a sinning couple. Tomorrow a churchman may sleep there, then a murderer, then a blacksmith, then a poet, and they will all bless that corner of earth that gave them a few illusions.

p. 111 …the main defect of this book is you, reader. You're in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly.

p. 117 The intensity of love was the same, the difference was that the flame had lost the mad brightness of the early days and had become a simple sheaf of rays, peaceful and content, as with marriages.

p. 143 As I contemplated how it chastely and completely covered her knee, I made a subtle discovery, to wit, that nature foresaw human clothing, a condition necessary for the development of our species. Habitual nudity, given the multiplicity of the works and cares of the individual, would tend to dull the senses and retard sex, while clothing, deceiving nature, sharpens and attracts desires, activates them, reproduces them, and consequently, drives civilization. A blessed custom that gave us Othello and transatlantic packets.

p. 158 …public opinion is a good glue for domestic institutions.

p. 161 … Uninstructed reader, if you don't keep the letters from your youth, you won't get to know the philosophy of old pages someday, you won't enjoy the pleasure of seeing yourself from a distance, in the shadows, with a three-cornered hat, seven-league boots, and a long Assyrian beard, dancing to the sound of Anachreonic pipes. Keep the letters of your youth! Or, if the three-cornered hat doesn't suit you, I'll use the expression of an old sailor, a friend of the Cotrims. I'll say that if you keep the letters of your youth, you'll find a chance to "sing a bit of nostalgia." It seems that our sailors give that name to songs of the land sung on the high seas. As a poetic expression it's something that can make you even sadder.

p. 165 We kill time; time buries us.

p. 166 Yes, it was fitting for me to be a father. The life of a celibate may have certain advantages of its own, but they would be tenuous and purchased at the price of loneliness.

p. 181 Good Lord! You've got to be a man! Be strong! Fight! Conquer! Dominate! Fifty is the age of science and government. Courage, Brás Cubas. Don't turn fool on me. What have you got to do with that succession from ruin to ruin, from flower to flower? Try to savor life. And be aware that the worst philosophy is that of the weeper who lies down on the riverbank to mourn the incessant flow of the waters. Their duty is never to stop. Make an adjustment to the law and try to take advantage of it.

p. 194 Why is is that a pretty woman looks into a mirror so much if not because she finds herself pretty and, therefore, it gives her a certain superiority over a multitude of women less pretty or absolutely ugly? Conscience is just the same. It looks at itself quite often when it finds itself pretty. Nor is remorse anything else but the twitch of a conscience that sees itself repugnant.

p. 195 …man executes, to the turn of the wheel of the great mystery, a double movement of rotation and translation. Its days are unequal, like those of Jupiter, and they comprise its more or less long year.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, r. Feb. 2014

p. 52 At the time, she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

p. 114 Time passed in a peculiar manner which the autobiographer, with her now rather abundant experience of murdered afternoons, is able to identify as depressive (at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chock-full second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour)

p. 130 That next afternoon, in Room 21, in broad daylight, with the windows open and the faded curtains billowing, they laughed and cried and fucked with a joy whose gravity and innocence it fairly wrecks the autobiographer to think back on, and cried some more and fucked some more and lay next to each other with sweating bodies and full hearts and listened to the sighing of the pines. Patty felt like she'd taken some powerful drug that wasn't wearing off, or like she'd fallen into an incredibly vivid dream that she wasn't waking up from, except that she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn't a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past, a romance unlike any romance she'd imagined. Because Room 21! How could she have imagined Room 21? It was such a sweetly clean old-fashioned room, and Walter such a sweetly clean old-fashioned person. And she was 21 and could feel her 21ness in the young, clean, strong wind that was blowing down from Canada. Her little taste of eternity.

p. 156 The days were bright and long, the nights startlingly cool. Patty loved early summer in the north, it took her back to her first days in Hibbing with Walter. The crisp air and moist earth, the conifer smells, the morning of her life.

p. 184 "Mom, I make your life so easy for you. Do you have any idea how easy? I don't do drugs, I don't do any of the shit that Joey does, I don't embarrass you, I don't create scenes, I never did any of that---" "I know! And I am truly grateful for it." "OK, but then don't complain if I have my own life and my own friends and don't feel like suddenly rearranging everything for you. You get all the benefits of me taking care of myself, the least you can do is not make me feel guilty about it."

p. 362 "The reason the system can't be overthrown in this country," Walter said, "is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they're not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europeans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this county isn't rational. It's taking place on a level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it."

p. 390 He was alone with his body; and since, weirdly, he was his body, this meant he was entirely alone.

p. 464 He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat.

p. 476 They had a tacit trusting way with each other, a way that reminded Walter of his and Patty's way when they were very young, the way of a couple united as a front against the world; his eyes misted up at the sight of their wedding bands.

p. 490 "To me," Walter said, "the difference is that birds are only killing because they have to eat. They're not doing it angrily, they're not doing it wantonly. It's not neurotic. To me that's what makes nature peaceful. Things live or they don't live, but it's not all poisoned with resentment and neurosis and ideology. It's a relief from my own neurotic anger."

p. 559 And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind. "It's me," she said. "Just me." "I know," he said, and kissed her.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, r. Sep. 2013

p. 15 The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.

p. 47 ...many people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard about it.

p. 63 ...the silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.

p. 68 "We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes."

p. 74 He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer - a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

p. 116 But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, r. Sep. 2013

p. 89 Don't you know how we lose the sense of our own individuality when there is nothing to reflect it back upon us? These people here have so little conception of our world that sometimes I feel myself as if I must have dreamed it.
p. 133 Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history: we need it to know what real injustice looked like.
p. 191 He was indulgent and paternal; she could see that every move she made and every word she spoke fascinated him.
p. 229 "How does one guarantee the probity of government science?" King said.... "It's quite simple," he said to Mrs. Jackson. "You pick men you would trust with your life, and you trust them with the Public Domain."
p. 238 As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.
p. 243 Grandmother wanted her son to grow up, as she had, knowing some loved place down to the last woodchuck hole.
p. 246 I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
p. 247 [The modern generation's] circuitry seems to have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
p. 251 What stretched unbroken from her great-great-grandfather, who had built this house, to her father, who would die in it, was cut short in her. The book about her grandfather that she had begun in affectionate memory was really a sort of epitaph.
p. 284 One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism - not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.
p. 340 I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull.
p. 352 No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. It is a law I take advantage of, and bless, but then I am not young, ambitious, and balked.
p. 375 1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will click and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. But Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, pre-dishwasher, pre-airplane, pre-automobile, pre-electric light, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-record player. Eyes too tired to read had no alternative diversions, ears that craved music or the sound of voices could crave in vain, or listen to Sister Lips whistle or talk to herself.
p. 395 Forgiving I have considered, although like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can't help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary.
p. 423 ...Bancroft's advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.
p. 452 There is a Japanese story called Insects of Various Kinds in which a spider trapped between the sliding panes of a window lies there inert, motionless, apparently lifeless, for many months, and then in spring, when a maid moves the window for a few seconds to clean it, springs once and is gone. Did Ellen Ward live that sort of trapped life? Released by the first inadvertent opportunity, was she? Seduced because she was waiting for the chance to be?
p. 456 [begins Chapter 6 - an amazing chapter about why communes and utopias fail - reread it]
p. 458 Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly's crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she's a long way from wise.
p. 467 How do I know what you should do? You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
p. 509 I am not so silly as to believe that what I dream about other people represents some sort of veiled or occult truth about them, but neither am I so stupid as to reject the fact that it represents some occult truth about me.
p. 510 ...[the angle of repose] is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson, r. Jul. 2012

p. 31 Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God's province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent.

p. 60 Isaac was twenty-three years old in a new country in a world where anything was possible. He was in the thick of it when everyone else back home could only read about it in the newspapers and in Jules Verne and in the thousands of dime novels about Buffalo Bill Cody. Isaac was a pioneer in a new science, a prairie Dampier, at a time when an ordinary man with patience and a knack for observation could change forever the way the world saw itself. Far to the north in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory another young man, Teddy Roosevelt of New York, was busy "pioneering" along with other East Coast blue bloods like Frederic Remington and Owen Wister, later to write The Virginian, who hoped to experience the frontier life before it disappeared. Roosevelt called this way of living "the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live."

p. 69 He continued Greely's campaign to reduce public skepticism about the bureau's ability to do much beyond simply recording changes in the weather. At the time of Harrington's appointment, Isaac wrote, "weather forecasting was nothing more than a listing of probabilities." Even something as basic as predicting the temperature twenty-four hours in advance was considered so likely to result in failure and public ridicule that the bureau forbade it.

p. 228 ... Sterett said, "I would rather have seen all the vessels of the earth stranded high and dry than to have seen this child's toy standing right out on the prairie, masterless."

p. 248 There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby. "A dream," Freud wrote, in 1900, in his Interpretation of Dreams, "is the fulfillment of a wish."

p. 266 A silence settled over Galveston. Its population stopped growing. It acquired all the sorrows of modern urban life, but none of the density and vibrance. It became a beach town for Houston.

p. 272 "Time can never be recovered," he said, "and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere."

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.

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, r. Nov. 2011

p. 181: "Here is a pretty toy for Tom and for his lady! Fair was she who long ago wore this on her shoulder. Goldberry shall wear it now, and we will not forget her!"

p. 286: Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is. (Rivendell)

p. 330: "And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one."

p. 334: Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

p. 431: Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, r. Sep. 2011

p. 299 "Murtagh was right about women. Sassenach, I risked my life for ye, committing theft, arson, assault, and murder into the bargain. In return for which ye call me names, insult my manhood, kick me in the ballocks, and claw my face. Then I beat you half to death and tell ye all the most humiliating things have ever happened to me, and you say ye love me." He laid his head on his knees and laughed some more. Finally he rose and held out a hand to me, wiping his eyes with the other. "You're no verra sensible, Sassenach, but I like ye fine. Let's go."

p. 410 He pulled himself gently from my grasp without answering and stood back, suddenly a figure from another time, seen in relief upon a background of hazy hills, the life in his face a trick of the shadowing rock, as if flattened beneath layers of paint, an artist's reminiscence of forgotten places and passions turned to dust. I looked into his eyes, filled with pain and yearning, and he was flesh again, real and immediate, love, husband, man.

p. 434 After breakfast the men prepared to go out, visiting tenants, inspecting fences, mending wagons, and generally enjoying themselves.

p. 580 It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.