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

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

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

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

How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman, r. Jan. 2015

p. 12 The Scots teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before. The present judges the past, not the other way around.

p. 64 In every case, the goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it.

p. 75 Shaftesbury also explained where the highest and most sophisticated polite cultures came from. The answer was simple: liberty. "All politeness is owing to Liberty," he wrote. "We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision."

p. 83 Hutcheson never worried about the dangers of letting people do or say whatever they wanted, because in his mind a free society enjoys a firm and permanent backstop, our innate moral sense, which enables us to distinguish the vicious from the virtuous, and the decent from the obscene, just as our intellectual reason enables us to sort out truth from falsehood.

p. 135 Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the  perfect society - except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.

p. 174 Hume planned for himself a house, coach-shed, and stables, and set to work finding a builder. "I am engaged in building a house," he wrote to a friend, "which is the second great operation of human life." The first, he explained, was marriage.

p. 206 Postmodern morality tells us constantly, "Don't be judgmental" - yet Adam Smith was saying that being judgmental is the essence of what makes us moral beings.

p. 212 ...capitalism brings an intellectual as well as an economic change. It alters the way we think about ourselves and about others: we become buyers and sellers, customers and suppliers, who strive to improve the quality and quantity of our output, in order to gratify our needs. Eventually, Smith states, the division of labor produces people who do nothing but think about improvements: engineers… scientists… and those whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything" - philosophers, teachers, and professional managers of every sort.

p. 213 [Smith] conceded that capitalism generates a great inequality of wealth, with a very few commanding the great bulk of commodities and a great part of the rest sharing what is left. But even so, Smith wanted to know, "in what manner shall we account for the superior affluence and abundance commonly possessed by even the lowest and most despised member of Civilized Society, compared with what the most respected and active savage can attain to."

p. 213 Commentators sometimes suggest that irony is the most characteristic attitude of the modern mind.

p. 260 Federal versus state power, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both…. Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers.

p. 265 [James Wilson] lived by Reid's maxim, "I despise philosophy and renounce its guidance; let my soul dwell in common sense." He always insisted that decisions be written in clear and straightforward language, avoiding any legal or technical jargon, so that any citizen could read and understand them.

p. 310 Virginia Woolf remarked of [Walter] Scott's novels, "part of their astonishing freshness, their perennial vitality, is that you may read them over and over again, and never know for certain what Scott himself was or what Scott himself thought."

p. 319 The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation's memory, and help to nourish its posterity.

p. 335 "Telford's is a happy life: everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbors - works of sure, solid, permanent utility…"

p. 343 Scottish virtues presented as a "personal power" to match the new mechanized power unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. You can be who you want to be, so choose carefully and learn to live with the result.

p. 355 Dugald Stewart had repeatedly emphasized to students that how a government came into being… mattered less than what the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was a good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it.

p. 378 …the new evangelism sought to provide a steadily improving inner spiritual life, to match the progress of society and "civilization." As the young David Livingstone discovered when he read the works of the Scottish astronomer and theologian Thomas Dick, science and religion were parallel paths to revealing God's truth. In other words, the thirst for knowledge of the world and the desire to be one with Jesus Christ were not at odds with each other.

p. 380 For all the risks he ran, Livingston enjoyed the strenuous effort his itinerant mission involved. "The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great," he wrote. "Great exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm."

p. 389 "Knowledge is of little use, then confined to mere speculation." [-Benjamin Rush]

p. 406 "The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these. It is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, we can claim." [-Andrew Carnegie]

p. 410 Then Samuel Morse had sent his first telegraphic message from Baltimore to Washington in 1844, the words he chose came from the Bible: "What hath God wrought?" The words have since seemed prophetic, expressing the sense of astonishment, almost foreboding, at how the world would change over the next century and a half, thanks to technology and the industrial age.

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, r. Jan. 2014

That in the two kingdoms above mentioned, where, during his residence, he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the STRULDBRUGS before their eyes.

"That the system of living contrived by me, was unreasonable and unjust; because it supposed a perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour, which no man could be so foolish to hope, however extravagant he may be in his wishes. That the question therefore was not, whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health; but how he would pass a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it. For although few men will avow their desires of being immortal, upon such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before mentioned, of Balnibarbi and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not observed the same general disposition."

After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the STRULDBRUGS among them. He said, "they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession: for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others.

"If a STRULDBRUG happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.

"As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds.

"At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable.

The language of this country being always upon the flux, the STRULDBRUGS of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country."

On The Road by Jack Kerouac, r. Dec. 2014

(audiobook, so don't know page numbers)

I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon... In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. 

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, r. Dec. 2014

p. xxvi Our ancestors were not more distinct from us, surely, than Jews are from Christians; they had "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions" [Shakespeare]; were "fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer," as ourselves. The tenor, therefore, of their affections and feelings, must have borne the same general proportion to our own.

p. 52 The walls of the apartment were so ill finished, and so full of crevices, that the rich hangings shook to the night blast, and, in despite of a sort of screen intended to protect them from the wind, the flame of the torches streamed sideways into the air, like the unfurled pennon of a chieftain. Magnificence there was, with some rude attempt at taste; but of comfort their was little, and, being unknown, it was unmissed.

p. 82 At length the barriers were opened, and five knights, chosen by lot, advanced slowly into the area…. It is unnecessary to be particular on these subjects. To borrow lines from a contemporary poet, who has written but too little - "The knights are dust, And their good sword are rust, Their souls are with the saints, we trust" [Coleridge]. Their escutcheons have long mouldered from the walls of their castles. Their castles themselves are but green mounds and shattered ruins - the place that once knew them, knows them no more - nay, many a race since theirs has died out and been forgotten in the very land which they occupied, with all the authority of feudal proprietors and feudal lords. What, then, would it avail the reader to know their names, or the evanescent symbols of their martial rank!

p. 291 These men were Saxons, and not free by any means from the national love of ease and good living which the Normans stigmatized as laziness and gluttony.

p. 304 …Glory, maiden, glory! …

p. 330 Trust me each state must have its policies: Kingdoms have edicts, cities have their charters; Even the wild outlaw, in his forest-walk, Keeps yet some touch of civil discipline; For not since Adam wore his verdant apron, Hath man with man in social union dwelt, But laws were made to draw that union closer." [Old Play]

p. 359 For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears.

p. 388 …trial moves rapidly on when the judge has determined the sentence beforehand.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, r. Dec. 2014

p. 6 …children have very little concept of time. Tomorrow is forever, and years pass in no time at all.

p. 20 And then, back in February, I found a letter from Matt waiting for me when I got home from work on Friday evening. I saw the writing and instantly I saw Matt - you know how handwriting conjures up the person.

p. 144 It was getting dark, and the cold was creeping in with the night. Matt told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you'd just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.

p. 196 The research I love. It calls for patience, precision, and a methodical approach, and all of those I have. That makes it sound dull, but it is far from full. On a pure level, it allows you to feel that you have added your own tiny piece to the jigsaw of scientific knowledge.

p. 241 Things change. Everyone has to grow up. But not grow apart, as we had done, surely?

p. 243 Daniel remarked… that [the backwoods of northern Ontario] seemed an unlikely environment to have produced an academic. That irritated me. Surely the most unlikely place to produce an academic is a city, with its noise and confusion and lack of time for thought or contemplation?

p. 259 That last stretch of the journey from Toronto to Crow Lake always takes me by the throat. Partly it's the familiarity; I know every tree, every rock, every boggy bit of marshland so well, that even though I almost always arrive after dark I can feel them around me, lying there in the darkness as if they were my own bones. Partly, too, it is the sensation of going back in time, moving from "now" to "then," and the recognition that wherever you are now and wherever you may be in the future, nothing alters the point you started from.

The World As We Know It by Joseph Monninger, r. Nov. 2014

p. 25 His workshop - a converted two-horse barn with a large, nickel-plated Franklin coal stove in the middle - was the kind of space that made visitors stop and silently evaluate their own lives.

p. 30 "Don't be fooled that there is something better than land. There isn't. The land will belong to you both. Don't divide it. Don't fracture it. Cut it judiciously. Walk it often and let it seep into you."

p. 31 He was a happy man. He had work to do and breakfast to come.

p. 38 I could hear a light, freezing rain falling on the roof. It felt delicious to be in bed, to feel the ache of a day spent outdoors in the cold, yet to be utterly warm and tired and ready for sleep.

p. 39 "You know Romeo and Juliet were only a little older than we are right now and they're the most famous lovers in the world." "But that's a story." "Everything is a story. If it didn't happened right in front of you, then it's a story."

p. 57 It was the world that I lived in, the world of my youth, and I knew and trusted it and believed it would always remain with me, carried in my heart like blood or knowing. And I understood for the first time that the great land did not exist in the north, or anywhere distant at all, really. It was here instead, on a hillside in New Hampshire, beside a white river flowing south and carrying the snow away each spring.

p. 69 "Character is plot," Sarah said often. "That's what my English teacher always says. She says we're interested in characters, not simple events. If all you need to make a film interesting is a bunch of events, then it would be easy. No, we have to care about the characters and see their predicaments."

p. 149 "There are no outdoorsmen! Just guys running around in the woods."

p. 153 "Dad helped us to be men. It sounds all weird when you talk like this, but it's true. He never made it look hard. He just spent time with us."