Working by Studs Terkel and adapted by Harvey Pekar, r. Dec. 2025

 p. xxi Nora Watson may have said it most succinctly. "I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people."

p. 99 "I get up about noon. I would only consider myself outside the norm because of the way other people live. They're constantly reminding me I'm abnormal. I could never bear to live the dull lives that most people live, locked up in offices. I live in absolute freedom. I do what I do because I want to do it. What's wrong with making a living doing something interesting?" (jazz musician)

p. 101 "Hundreds of times I've gone to work thinking, oh my God, I hate to think of playing tonight. It's going to be awful. But something on that given night takes place and I'm excited before it's over. Does that make sense? If you have that kind of night, you're not aware of the time, because of this thing that hits you." (jazz musician)

p. 104 "Real talent takes a long time to mature, to learn how to bring what character you have into sound, into your playing, not the instrument, but the style of music you're trying to create should be an extension of you. And this takes a whole life." (jazz musician)

p. 160 "Peace and quiet and privacy have meant a great deal to me since I made my escape. Of course I'm a has-been. Radio itself is a has-been. But the quiz kids achieved history and I'm proud to have been part of it. ...The reason I like this job is that my mind is at ease all day long..." (greenhouse worker and former child genius)

p. 162 He dropped out of high school. "It's a good way to go. Take what you can stand and don't take any more than that. It's what God put the tongue in your mouth for. If it don't taste right, you spit it out." (carpenter)

p. 163 "Any work, you kneel down – it's a kind of worship. It's part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. It's necessary. If you don't breathe, you're dead. It's kind of a sacrament, too." (carpenter)

I Served The King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, r. Jun. 2025

p. 25 ... and just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful.

p. 151 I also learned that the closest one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then the final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief.

p. 182 That was the height of my career, that was what made me a man who had not lived in vain. I began to look at my hotel as a work of art, as my own creation, because that was how others saw it, and they opened my eyes...

p. 215 ... it was a way of making fun of myself, because I was independent now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk more and more.

p. 226 ... when I looked back on [my life, it] seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by grass and weeds at either end.

p. 227 And I talked in a jumbled way about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and thought it was ten at night while it was really only half past six, when you started talking to yourself...

p. 236 And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage.

p. 239 At first the pictures were unclear and I even wrote out some that had no point to them, but then suddenly the writing began to flow, and I covered page after page while the pictures in front of my eyes went by faster than I could write, and this gap between pictures and the writing kept me awake at night.

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.

Sun House by David James Duncan, r. Oct. 2023

p. 30 Risa never connected this tribe to her own amiability, diplomacy, strategic withdrawals, radiant energy, crazy grin, or anything of the sort. She believed she'd just lucked into an unusually cool circle of friends. But though many people spend energy in search of some sort of calm and stable center, a very few people simply are such centers. Without realizing it, Risa had become one of these rare ones, and as a result was encircled by friends in almost every milieu she frequented.

p. 114 Glancing from her poems to his journal, a pleasing thought occurred to Lorilee. She spoke it. "You know, you're a poet yourself, Trey. Your body's your pen. The mountains are your paper. Free-climbing vertical walls, you leave behind the lines your body traveled. And yeah, those lines are invisible once you come down off the wall. But I'll bet they've entered you. I'll bet those lines stay inside your mind and body the way a good mountain song or poem stays in my instruments and me. So who cares if others can't see what you wrote up there? It's in you."

p. 136 Trey looked lost. She tried to coax him. "The reason Snyder says 'The mountains are your mind' is that every mountain's true nature is alive and complete for all eternity, Trey. And so is our true nature. We have always been one with the mountains. But it's not climbing them that makes this so. It's being free of illusions. It's a disappearing of ego...

p. 189 ...which brings me to why I prefer high-mountain backpacking to skiing. In backpacking, the suffering endured as you climb sensitizes you to the gorgeousness when you arrive on high, and your elation lasts and lasts. In skiing, a mechanical lift crammed with party-hardies ratchets you to elevation in minutes, only to turn around and, in seconds, undo all the elevation gain you didn't suffer to achieve, so that way too soon you're DOWN and the only cure for elation deflation is to get back in the party-hardy line, pay the piper, ratchety-ratchet back up, and bouncy-bounce down again, up, down, up, down, wanka wanka wanka.

p. 229 "It also seems you are taught, you priests, to defend your God, but never to blame Him. This is a mistake. When we blame God, two things happen. On, He becomes present. He is now there with the sufferer, taking blame. And two, why not blame God? He's God. He can take all the blame there is! Go ahead! Blame Him! It keeps Him with you!"

p. 280 "Anna often talks of rising acidity in the oceans. But I wonder about our acidity? It's risen too. And how could it not? The rich own everything, including our token democracy, banks, and corporations, we're led by political half-truths and lobbyists, not leaders, and to try to understand our world we watch news-flavored propaganda delivered in meaningless soundbytes. But doesn't our acidity, like the oceans', cause delicate things to die out in us? I feel as if things as fine as coral reefs are vanishing from people. Things like a general kindness. Quiet sensitivity. Sincerity."

p. 308 Risa waited till she was calm enough not to hurl Julian's scathing tone back in his face. "What I experience," she said quietly, "is a feeling of arrogance if I pretend that spiritual giants like the Buddha and Jesus and Krishna don't know more about such matters than I do. Would you contradict Beethoven if he shared secrets about composing symphonies, or diss Martina Navratilova's secrets about crushing top-spin serves, because what they said was beyond your experience? It's common sense to believe it when Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus in the Apocrypha all tell us reincarnation is the way of it. That's not teatime chitchat. My concepts of mind and soul are based on truths that realized beings bequeath humanity to free us from illusion."

p. 340 "You didn't ask for my two cents but here they are: the only way you won't be disappointed with your life is by finding something great to do with it. That's the blessing and curse of being great yourself."

p. 394 On a high peak in the Alps, a climber named Emile Javelle once looked out over the world and was swallowed alive by a vastness that overwhelmed him. Years passed before he could even speak of it. When he did, he said that any philosophy, religion, or science that tells us what the universe is, or what our place and purpose here are, is a blindfold, not a seeing. 'The further the vision of our eye extends,' Javelle said, 'the greater the mystery becomes.'"

p. 456 It will be the task of our generation not to seek great things, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

p. 469 Here in this body is a dwelling place. Within the dwelling place is a small space. What is there in this space that we should seek to perceive?

p. 495 In all but certain rare kinds of light – blue June dusk; golden day in October; midwinter moonlight amid fresh snowfall – the connecting thread won't even be visible.

p. 512 "I like retired traces like this," Lou said as he ratcheted along. "Keep cows an' vehicles off a track a few years, give it a mow now an' again, an' it takes on a gentleness. We'll reach that school feelin' better'n if we drove up. On foot a fella actually arrives."

p. 583 Unlike humans, fish are not ignorant of each other's intentions.

p. 707 The chronological presumption that we're "progressing into a better future" has not just blinded humans to the fullness of the moment, it's put the very survival of life on Earth in doubt.

p. 716 "'Silence is the tribute we pay to holiness,'" Kale whispered, "'We slip off words when we enter a sacred place just as we slip off shoes.'" [– Pico Iyer]

The Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey, r. Jun. 2023

 p. 7 No one has a right to complain about life because no one is compelled to endure it.

p. 31 She bought the uniform: the Nike shoes, the flimsy erotic Adidas track shorts, the heavy-duty reinforced breast sling, the long-billed sunshade, the AM/FM Walkman radio headset, and commenced to laboring up and down the streets with Eric Clapton and James Taylor bawling in her ears, the jogger's look of smug pain and spiritual fortitude on her face. Favoring her sore foot, she gulped the dust and grime and noxious gases of the passing motor traffic.

p. 103 Onward, through the scrubby woods and past a solitary winter-shaggy horse in a huge and lonely field. The field looks lonely, not the horse. Why is that?

p. 150 Nobody paid [his dad] any attention and he knew it and the knowledge made him angry and lonely and sick in his heart. Joe Lightcap was not a philosopher; he took ideas seriously.

p. 181 There's two ways to be rich: (1) sweat and scheme and grovel for money and never get it anyhow; or (2) live the simple life. Sit down.

p. 258 What is the perfect robot anyhow but a properly processed human being? a soundly pussywhipped American male?

p. 301 Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it – bottomless? What is our history but a vivid and continuous dream? We skim over the roadway bearing northeast to Kansas, me and my mortal dog, and the infinite dimensions of the recent past – a mere one century – make the brain giddy, the mind reel, the heart to swoon.

p. 329 Yes, it was a good sweet job. Old Gibbsie was a good superintendent. The United States government was a government. Henry Lightcap had found his niche, his slot, his cranny, his refuge in the vast vermiculate edifice of the American socioeconomy. And he kept it too, off and on, for the next fifteen years, working five, six months a year in various national parks and national forests, through national chaos and international calamity. Brother Will might disapprove, thinking such work unworthy of a full-grown man, little better than welfare, but for Henry Lightcap – a "fool-grown man," as he liked to explain, such a part-time occupation made the ideal vocation. Henry Lightcap needed those half years free. Why? For what? For the sake of freedom itself, he told his inner critic. Liberty like virtue is its own reward, the only reward it's likely to get. And for the sake of simplicity – la vie philosophique.

p. 334 To be sexually attractive is to be perpetually on guard. A pretty girl lives in a state of constant siege. And how we loved it-the tension, the conflict, the promise of delight.

p. 435 ... and what did all that laborious reading gain him? Couldn't say. He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument – philosophy is an art form, not a science – but simply the quality of the author's mind. That part remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer. And that drive also, the mania to know and understand, it too waned somewhat with the passing of years, until he found himself again alone...

p. 481 Again Henry gazed out the window. A swirl of little pale birds, like confetti, like a net of lace, exfoliated from the sky and draped themselves upon an Aleppo pine. Water sprinklers jetted in explosive circles, drenching the hospital lawns. Just plain folks walked about. The world continued, bland and blasé, while catastrophe opened beneath the one who cared.

The Practice by Seth Godin, r. Aug. 2021

p. 22 Our passion is simply the work we've trusted ourselves to do.... The trap is this: only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion. "Do what you love" is for amateurs. "Love what you do" is the mantra for professionals.

p. 33 It's not important that the kids developed their musical skills when they were eleven. It's important that they developed the habit of identity. When they looked in the mirror, they saw themselves as musicians, as artists, as people who had committed to a journey.

p. 64 Generosity is the most direct way to find the practice. Generosity subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else. Generosity means that we don't have to seek reassurance for the self, but can instead concentrate on serving others. It activates a different part of our brain and gives us a more meaningful way forward. People don't want to be selfish, and giving in to resistance when you're doing generous work feels selfish.

p. 68 Positive people are more likely to enjoy the practice. They're not wasting any time experiencing failure in advance.

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.

Go Big by Cory Cotton, r. Dec. 2016

...because if you don't love what you do, neither will anyone else.

But while passion isn't everything, it is crucial. Passion is a good indicator of where your efforts will be best spent.

The most successful YouTubers out there release content on a regular basis. Their viewers notice it. They come to expect it. And eventually, they come to depend on it.... The key here is to keep your brand on the minds of your audience. And from what we've seen, that's what's so powerful about social media.

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 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?

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, r. July 2015

p. 14 Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.

p. 43 Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

p. 58 Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

p. 60 Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

p. 121 Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

p. 123 Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.

p. 136 For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.

p. 148 In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the masthead; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes, extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

p. 163 Oh boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!

p. 166 Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once.

p. 216 After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

p. 324 I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.

p. 383 The sea had jeeringly kept [Pip's (after almost drowning alone)] finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

p. 396 But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, [Ahab] seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.

p. 428 Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

p. 431 No fear; I like a good [vice]grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.

p. 586 Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am. - D. H. Lawrence

Of Hills and Dales - 2015 Commencement Address by Michael Ward, r. Jun. 2015

p. 5 And I think quite a lot of people find the years straight out of college to be some of the hardest in life. All the educational framework which you've used to hold yourself up, and which in large part you've defined yourself by, is taken away and you're like a climbing rose without a trellis. And you either lie on the ground and rot or allow yourself to be pruned and get turned into a rosebush which can stand its own integrity.

p. 5 Suffice it to say, from that point on things began to improve. By which I don't mean that I jumped straight out of the [post-graduation/what-to-do-with-my-life] trough and shot up the greasy pole of success again, nor that I just exchanged low spirits for high spirits. I began to realize that hills and dales are equally impostors - like Kipling's triumph and disaster. Success can't keep its promises and failure can't hold its ground. One shouldn't be bamboozled by either state. The important thing is not to be in a certain state, but to be a certain kind of person in whichever state you find yourself. Sure, I think one has a duty to do as much as one can to fulfill one's potential, to strive for success, certainly to do good and avoid evil, but the outcome of one's efforts is of secondary importance. To quote a certain wizard's advice to a Mr. Underhill (significant name) who was lamenting that he lived in dark days: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Or to paraphrase Mother Teresa: We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.

p. 7 At graduation I thought I'd arrived. Having done all I was told I should accomplish by way of earning a good degree from a good school, I thought I could expect life to unfurl smoothly before me in a series of ever more pleasant and successful scenes. It took me quite a while to realize that this wasn't to be my lot, that this is the lot of nobody, and that life actually proceeds according to what C.S. Lewis calls the "law of undulation." G.K. Chesterton called it the rolling English road.

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, r. May 2015

p. 17 Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs [of beer] help.

p. 35 He had gazed upon this scene a hundred times in his life so far; he knew that he might have only a hundred more.

p. 40 The brightest thing in Abbzug's dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good to do.

p. 60 "The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness."

p. 62 Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.

p. 63 Tho entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition.

p. 65 The river in its measureless sublimity rolled softly by, whispering of time. Which heals, they say, all. But does it? The stars looked kindly down. A lie. A wind in the willows suggested sleep. And nightmares. Smith pushed more drift pine into the fire, and a scorpion, dormant in a crack deep in the wood, was horribly awakened, too late. No one noticed the mute agony. Deep in the solemn canyon, under the fiery stars, peace reigned generally.

p. 154 "You're a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds."

p. 237 While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see.

p. 336 What do we really know? … The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.

What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk (article in The Atlantic), r. Oct. 2014

The youth that the old envy is accommpanied by the miserable process of getting from 25 to 35. We've got all this health, and all this youth, and you're scared stiff that when it's all said and done, you're not going to amount to a hill of beans; and if you just wait, virtually all the men, by the time they were 45, or 50, amounted to something. Knowing that is such relief, and you just don't know it at 30. I mean, this process is fun - it's all change - but it's just as much fun to have wrinkles and reminisce. The job isn't conforming, it isn't keeping up with the Joneses, it is playing and working and loving, and loving is probably the most important. Happiness is love.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/?single_page=true

Barren Lives by Graciliano Ramos, r. Apr. 2014

p. 126

Now she wanted to know what the boys were going to do when they grew up.

"Herd cattle," was Fabiano's opinion.

Vitoria made a face of disgust, shaking her head in disagreement at the risk of causing the tin trunk to fall. Our Lady save them from such misfortune! Herd cattle! What an idea! They were going to a far country, where they would forget the brushland with its hills and hollows, its pebbles, its dry rivers, thorns, vultures, dying cattle, and dying people. They would never com back; they would resist the homesickness that attacks backlanders in green country. Were they to die of sadness for lack of thorns? They would settle down far away and would take on new ways.

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.

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.