The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, r. Mar. 2026

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

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

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

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

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

50 Great Short Stories, r. May 2019

p. 50 One had taken it for granted at the time, for anything that is supremely good produces more acceptance than surprise. (Brooksmith by Henry James)

p. 196 "It's one of the best riddles I've heard, though," I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two." (For Esmé with Love and Splendor by J. D. Salinger)

p. 221 He had managed to accomplish all this without ever giving people the impression that he was particularly interested in the business; yet he had always followed everything done with a keen and remorseless attention that masked itself under an appearance of impassivity. (The Man Who Shot Sleeping Turtles by Edmund Wilson)

p. 248 What was happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears; he wanted so passionately to live. "Just to be alive." Poor Emily had wished it too, he remembered: "Just to be alive." There were still so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the Tucsan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet southern wines - Tears of Christ and Blood of Judas - others would drink them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all. (The Giaconda Smile by Aldous Huxley)

p. 374 "One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands, looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it - the taste of primitive passion - the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one's hand - the direct call and the straight response. Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matter with the world." (The Tale by Joseph Conrad)

p. 379 "The master met him on the after-deck, looming up in the fog amongst the blurred shapes of the usual ship's fittings. He was a robust Northman, bearded, and in the force of his age." (The Tale by Joseph Conrad)

p. 397 His father's teeth - ninety dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age. (Main Currents of American Thought by Irwin Shaw)

The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane, r. Oct. 2015

p. 52 The youth looked keenly at the ashen face [of the dead soldier]. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

p. 70 As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleaming on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.

p. 128 He did not give a great deal of thought to these battles that lay directly before him. It was not essential that he should plan his ways in regard to them. He had been taught that many obligations of a life were easily avoided. The lessons of yesterday had been that retribution was a laggard and blind. With these facts before him he did not dream it necessary that he should become feverish over the possibilities of the ensuing twenty-four hours. He could leave much to chance.

p. 199 A changed tide tried to force them southward, but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.

p. 308 The autumn smote the leaves, and the trees of Whilomville were panoplied in crimson and yellow. The winds grew stronger, and in the melancholy purple of the nights the home shine of a window became a finer thing. The little boys, watching the sear and sorrowful leaves drifting down from the maples, dreamed of the near time when they could heap bushels in the streets and burn them during the abrupt evenings.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, r. Apr. 2015

p. 36 What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:

p. 71 When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

p. 81 To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.

p. 122 "Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear."

p. 158 ...it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up certain others.

p. 184 Everything was too ordinary. A quiet sunny day, and the field was not the field I remembered. I pictured Kiowa's face, the way he used to smile, but all I felt was the awkwardness of remembering.

p. 184 There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.

p. 230 The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

p. 246 I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is a Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

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.