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.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, r. Apr. 2015

p. 28 Pozzo: I too would be happy to meet him. The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings.

p. 73 Vladimir: And where were we yesterday evening according to you? Estragon: How would I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void.

p. 77 Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians.

p. 90 Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.

p. 103 Pozzo: …. They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

p. 105. Vladimir: …. But habit is a great deadener.

O Vendedor de Sonhos: O Chamado por Augusto Cury, l. abr. 2015

p. 96 “— Show? Cada dia é um show, cada dia um espetáculo. Só não o descobre quem está mortalmente ferido pelo tédio. O drama e a comédia estão em nosso cérebro. Basta despertá-los.”

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.

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette, r. Mar. 2015

p. 99 "There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich." -Charles Kindleberger

p. 133 "What is sought with difficulty is discovered with more pleasure." -St. Augustine

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 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.