NOTE: Some formatting has been lost in the transfer from the original Word document to this site.  Rather than go through the one-hundred plus pages to reformat, let me tell you simply that some writers' names should have accents (e.g., an umlaut).  In addition, book titles should be italicized, as should some words in specific quotes or passages.  Short story titling is intact, i.e., there are quotation marks around them.

In any case, enjoy!

Marry, and you will regret it.  Do not marry, and you will also regret it.  Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way.  Whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way.  Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it.  Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way.  Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way.  Trust a girl, and you will regret it.  Do not trust her, and you will also regret it.  Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way.  Whether you trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way.  Hang yourself, and you will regret it.  Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it.  Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way.  Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way.  This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.
    —A., Either/Or I

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.
    —Nabokov, Lolita.

it's a lark i've taken hard,
and i know i will carry with me
for a long, long time. 
    —Liz Phair, "Canary", Exile in Guyville

i wouldn't dare to
bring out this
awful bliss 
    —GBV, "Awful Bliss", Bee Thousand

you sleep with electric guitars,
Range rovin' with the cinema stars.
And I wouldn't wanna shake their hands,
'Cuz they're in such a high protein land,
Because there's forty different shades of black,
So many fortresses and ways to attack
    —Pavement, "Elevate Me Later", Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

I was dressed for success, but success it never comes.
    —Pavement, "Here", Slanted and Enchanted

And there's blood on my teeth,
When I bite my tongue to speak.
    —Afghan Whigs, "My Curse", Gentlemen


Please allow me to present you with a clue.
If I inflict the pain, then baby only I can comfort you.
        —Afghan Whigs, "When We Two Parted", Gentlemen

Always crush me.
Picture my amazement when it doesn't always pain me;
and I will reproduce faster.
    —GBV, "Always Crush Me"

I give this to you, dear reader, with the diffidence of a child who gives to his parents a gift they have already given him. 
    —Kierkegaard The Point of View

“She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 
    —Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

“Hell is other people.” 
    —Sartre, "No Exit"

You must change your life
    —Rilke. "Archaic Torso of Apollo"

I've changed, but I'm in pain.
    —Morrissey, "Dial a Cliche"

You've caught me at a bad time,
so why don't you piss off.
    —New Order, "Your Silent Face"

and then the time will come when you add up the numbers,
and then the time will come when you motor away
     —GVB, "Motor Away", Alien Lanes

I speak in monotone, "Leave my fucking life alone."
    —GBV, "As We Go Up We Go Down", Alien Lanes

Man is a whale out of water, hope is a bone on a string, doing everything the hard way
     —GBV

My life is dirt but you seem to make it cleaner, reduce my felony to a misdemeanor.  When I feel sick you're an antibiotic, organize my world, my world is pointless and chaotic.  I get a contact buzz, can't remember what the problem was.  I find it hard to even care, life was too real until you got there.
    —GBV, "Contact Buzz"

I've gotta to tell you my tale,
Of how I loved
And how I failed
    —The Verve, "History", A Northern Soul

Another drink and I won't miss her.
    —The Verve, "So It Goes", A Northern Soul

Oh, no, I’ve said too much,
I haven’t said enough.
    —R.E.M., “Losing My Religion”, Out of Time

Gas, Daddy, gas, ‘cause tomorrow’s the border, the edge,
it’s guarded by choice.
    —Tobin Sprout, “Gas Daddy Gas” Carnival Boy

to be conscious is an illness
    —Fyodor Dostoyevski, Notes From the Underground

I used to live in this corner before, but now I have settled down in it.
    —Dostoyevski, Notes From the Underground

This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.
    —Martin Amis, The Information

he was at the time of life when — sitting in a garden or a park — he was more pleased than vexed if a bee buzzed him, flattered that anything, however briefly and stupidly, could still mistake him for a flower.
    —Martin Amis, The Information

For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation.  Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away.  You can say this for increasing humiliation: at least it was gradual.
    That's what you'd have to do, to make it all new again.  You'd have to make the universe feel smaller.
    —Martin Amis, The Information

Frighten me?  Yes you do frighten me.  You act as though we will be together for ever.  You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end.  How can I know that?  My experience has been that time always ends.  In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right.  Time without end.  In practice we both wear a watch.  If I rush at this relationship it's because I fear for it.  I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you'll be gone.  Then what?  Then what as I bang the walls like the Inquisition searching for a saint?  Where will I find the secret passage?  For me it'll just be the same four walls. 
    —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Wallowing is sex for depressives.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Cheating is easy.  There's no swank to infidelity.  To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first.  You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on.  Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

That skulls should grin is repellent to us who come with dark flowers and mournful sober faces.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

What kills love?  Only this: Neglect.  Not to see you when you stand before me.  Not to think of you in the little things.  Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you.  To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought.  To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night.  To crave another while pecking your cheek.  To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

One's time is hard to put a value on: much of it, clearly and inevitably, is spent to no immediate profit, and one of the Christian consolations, as I construe them, is that the Lord's unsleeping witness and strict accountancy redeems all moments from pointlessness, just as his Son's sacrifice redeemed Time in the larger sense.  But my time, surely, was ill-spent in sitting and listening to the praises of the scheduled air service to Cleveland...
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

“If God wished, as Genesis...tell[s] us, to make the world a theatre for Man, why make it so unusably vast, so horribly turbulent and, ah, crushing to contemplate?  The solar system, with an attractive background spatter of stars, would have been quite enough, surely.  To have the galaxy on top of that, and then all those other galaxies...” 
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

“For myself, I must confess I find your whole idea aesthetically and ethically repulsive.  Aesthetically because it describes a God who lets Himself be intellectually trapped, and ethically because it eliminates faith from religion, it takes away our freedom to believe or doubt.  A God you could prove makes the whole thing immensely, oh, uninteresting.  Pat.  Whatever else God may be, He shouldn't be pat.”
    “But sir, think of the comfort to all those who want to believe but don't dare because they've been intellectually intimidated.  Think of the reassurance to all those in trouble or in pain and wanting to pray.”
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version
 
Barth had been right: totaliter aliter.  Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured...  All else is mere philosophy... 
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

What was this desolation in Dale's heart, I thought, but the longing for God — that longing which is, when all is said and done, our only evidence of His existence?
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

there are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

Lying there with Verna, gazing upward, I saw how much majesty resides in our continuing to love and honor God even as He inflicts blows upon us — as much as resides in the silence He maintains so that we may enjoy and explore our human freedom.  This was my proof of His existence, I saw the distance to the impalpable ceiling, the immense distance measuring our abasement.  So great a fall proves great heights.  Sweet certainty invaded me.  “Bless you” was all I could say.
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

You sleep with someone in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

Indeed, it has occurred to me that in my sensation of peace post coitum, of sweet theistic certainty beneath the remote vague ceiling, of living proof at Verna's side, I was guilty of heresy... — that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God's forgiveness can magnificently play.  Más, más. But thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God.
    —John Updike, Rodger's Version

It's true, these are my friends, but by necessity, not choice.  I avoid choices with the same stumbling retreat that I use to avoid consequences.  Unfortunately, I'm often caught (and done in) by the consequences of choices I never made.  Save for the infrequent favors bestowed by Providence, nothing comes easy, not without more luck than I got.  In the midst of my confusion, three or four answers will come at me in a flurry: what will I be doing in a year?—still learning.  What will I want?—my worry is loss, not gain.  One look at my friends and the logical third question is: Who will be with me?  I can only hope it is God.  My God.
     —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

He's not such a bad guy, God, but He's not very ingenious.  Satan is just an addition to His long list of creative failures.  He had started out with the image of a musical Adonis and ended up with a gaudy used-up whore.  The pressure is wearing at Him constantly because all about Him are things He created, and none of it satisfies Him. 
    —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

Better she dislike me on my terms than for reasons I can't control.
    —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

There's a disappointment etched in the uneven landscape that I can relate to; though I'm not really a failure, not yet, I could turn out that way.  All the road signs have put me on guard.  Things could get nasty.  I could find out I'm even less the person I think I am, and as it is, I feel like a piece of shit.  Destiny is a poetic word for some; for me it's a graveyard.  Sometimes I wish I could just get it over with, fail now and avoid the prolonged agony.  Hope can be a real son of a bitch.
    —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

“Morality is whatever you ain't, Luke.  It's whatever people ain't.  That's why people cain't teach you nothin.”
    —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

God takes the news rather badly, “Why can't they just wait?  The universe will be theirs soon enough,” He tells me, as if I'm not one of “them.”
    Satan is overjoyed.  “I think it's another vote of no confidence, my Sweet.”
      —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

“That's the whole point, lady.  You're above me so don't try relating to me.”
    I'd save that line though.  Save it for my exit.
    —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

With eyes like that, it'd be a sin if she didn't smoke.
    —Lionel Newton, getting right with god

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.  Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answeting the fundamental question of philosophy.  All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
  Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end................ 
  There is only one serious question.  And that is:
  Who knows how to make love stay?
  Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.
  Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time.
  Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.
    —Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Finitely understood, of course, the continued and the perpetually continued striving toward a goal without attaining it means rejection, but, infinitely understood, striving is life itself and is essentially the life of that which is composed of the infinite and the finite.
    SK, JP V 5796 (Pap. VI B 35:24)

It never fails that one fool going his way takes several others along with him.
    —Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Fragments

And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.  Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests.  Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray.  The next was almost wholly white, but for a salmon glaze at its throat.  As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.
    —John Updike, "Pigeon Feathers".  (Matthew 10:29—?)

I said yes and I said it immediately.  And why?  Because I sensed that questions that didn't receive an immediate response fell away into silence and were never answered.  They got sucked into the black hole.  I'd observed this, and I knew the trick was to close the gap in Mrs. Gurney's mind, to bridge that spooky silence between the question and the answer...The answer was in the immediacy, the swiftness of my response, stripped of all uncertainty and hesitation. 
    —Charles D'Ambrosio, "The Point".

His silence belittled and dismissed her words.
    —Charles D'Ambrosio, "Jacinta"

He wants me around, to witness everything.    
    —Charles D'Ambrosio, "Jacinta"

I thought of my own faith, which has gone the way of the tooth fairy — in the beginning it was fun and profitable, something to look forward to, and then it compensated for things I lost, and now, as I look back, I see that it was all just child's play, a shell game of sorts, so that these days when I put my head on my pillow, facing ip to the darkness above, I hope for nothing more than a good night's rest.
    —Charles D'Ambrosio, "All Aboard"

In general you hope the truth will show up.  Then it does.  So what?  Where do you go after you know the truth?
    —Charles D'Ambrosio, "All Aboard"

But in the wide galaxy of people, I'm not that spectacular, not a man to set off shock waves through the universe.  There's an orbital steadiness to the things I do, and perhaps what I have, at best, is the capacity to be decent, to behave in a way that other men can predict.  A man parks his car at night, he expects the engine to be there in the morning.  That's life to me.
    —Charles D'Ambrosio, "All Aboard"

he nevertheless continues to attend as quickly as he is able to a weak porch rail, or the dripping of a spigot in the bathroom, or a tack come loose from the runner in the hall—and all this to maintain not only the comfort of those who live with him yet, but the dignity of all too, such as it is.
    —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

Ginny, a fully grown, fully developed woman, looking down with that pale dopey face for Lucy to tell her what to do next — and little Lucy, who was no bigger than a bird.  Behind the happy child, Ginny would go running across the lawn, the toes of her high shoes pointing out, and taking quick little steps to keep up — a strangely beautiful scene, but a melancholy one, too, for it was proof not only of their love for each other, but of the fact that in Ginny's brain so many things were melted together that in real life are separate and distinct.  She seemed always to think that Lucy was somehow herself — that is, more Ginny, or the rest of Ginny, or the Ginny people called Lucy.  When Lucy ate an ice cream, Ginny's eyes would get all happy and content, as though she were eating it herself.  Or if as a punishment Lucy was put to bed early, Ginny, too, would sob and go off to sleep like one doomed...
    —Philip Roth When She Was Good

Back when she was a child the very frailty of his daughter's bones could bring Willard to tears with awe, especially in the evening when  he sat looking over the top of his paper at her as she practiced her piano lesson.  There were times when it seemed to him as though nothing in the world could so make a man want to do good in life as the sight of a daughter's thin little wrists and ankles. 
    —Philip Roth When She Was Good

“The way we do it in this house, Lucy, is we talk to a person.  We show him the right.”
“And if he doesn't know it?”
“Lucy, we do not send him to jail!  That's the only point.  Is that clear?”
“No!”
    —Philip Roth When She Was Good

There is nothing the man can do.  He is afflicted with himself.
    —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

“People are just more fragile than you give them credit for sometimes!”  “Well, that is their lookout.....They are their own lookout, not mine, and not yours.”
        —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

So, said Willard to himself, he actually did it.  Actually got on a bus and came.  After all that has happened, after all the misery he has caused, he has had the nerve to get on a bus and then get off it and to wait here half an hour, expecting to be picked up...Oh, you idiot! he thought, and unseen yet, glared at his middle-aged son-in-law, his new shoes, his new suitcase — oh, sure, new man too!  You dumb cluck!  You scheming, lying, thieving ignoramus!  You weak, washed-out lushhead, sucking the life's blood from every human heart there is!  You no-good low-life weakling!   So what if you can't help it!  So what if you don't mean it—
    “—Duane,” said Willard, stepping forward, “How you doing, Duane?”
        —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

He would do anything now to avoid a battle, anything but really change.
    —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

There was a point beyond which one could not go in believing in the potential for good in another human being, and after four nightmarish years she had finally reached it.
    —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

Inside, that is all they are, just skeletons; inside, all of them are the same.  She has learned the names of every human bone in her biology class — the tibia, the scapula, the femur...Oh, why can't people be good?  Inside, they are only bones and strings and blood, kidney's an brains and glands and teeth and arteries and veins.  Why, why can't they just be good?
    —Philip Roth, When She Was Good

“I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”
    —Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
    But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.”
    “And sometimes it isn't,” said Marvin Breed.
    —Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Christ concealed something from his disciples because they could not bear it.  That was loving of him, but was it moral?  That is one of the most difficult moral doubts; if by concealing something I can save another man from suffering, have I the right to do so, or do I not interfere in his human existence?  At that point lies the paradox of my life, before God I am always in the wrong, but is it a crime against mankind?
    —Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers

of all the things this was the saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one's lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop too; and it never did.  And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn't.
    —Truman Capote, "Master Misery"

What makes most people feel happy leads us headlong into harm.
    —Morrissey/The Smiths, "Paint a Vulgar Picture", Strangeways, Here We Come

Are you real, or am I simply ugly?
    —Lisa Germano, "Victoria's Secret", Love Circus

My own view is that apathy is an acceptable, if not admirable, stance because it actively reduces frustration and despair and to that extent makes the world a better place.
    —Mark Salzman, The Soloist

Von Kempen was a deeply religious man, but not in the sense of contemplation of the supernatural or the promise of an afterlife; he simply couldn't get over his sense of awe and wonder that something as magnificent and beautiful as music could be channeled through such flawed creatures as human beings.  Every time he encountered music he opened his mind to it with the humility and gratitude of someone receiving a gift he could not possible deserve.  Toward the end of his life that attitude grew to embrace such ordinary phenomena as the changing light of the seasons, the sounds of migrating birds or the taste of fine tobacco.
    —Mark Salzman, The Soloist

“this suit is to be worn only for music, not simply for amusement.  Take good care of it, and put it on with care.  Comb your hair neatly, and look carefully in the mirror to be sure everything is in order, as any estimable gentleman might.  Only then should you practice.”
    —Mark Salzman, The Soloist

Just before my first solo appearance with a full symphony von Kempen told me that an orchestral composition is like a piece of elaborately woven fabric.  If you damage even one of the threads, the others around it start to unravel and the whole fabric can disintegrate.  This is why individual members of the orchestra must be vigilant and maintain their concentration, even during passages when they don’t play at all.
    —Mark Salzman, The Soloist

When you play music well, you are transported.  However, my experience has been that you cannot make great music happen; you can only prepare yourself for it to happen.  To a degree, your preparation determines what will happen, but once it starts happening you have to surrender yourself to it.  Once you do so you are free, except that you are free only within the boundaries you created through your preparation.
    —Mark Salzman, The Soloist

what matters is that the seed of doubt is planted in his mind, the suspicion that if the stripteaseuse is Woman, then his wife is something else, whereas if his wife is Woman, then the stripteaseuse must be something more, the Female Principle or sex or ecstasy or sin or glamour.  She is, in any case, that which is denied him, the spectator; that he cannot achieve...The typical striptease relationship demands that the woman, who has offered the definitive spectacle for her possibilities of satisfaction, is absolutely not for consumption...the triumph of the naked woman in the spotlights, as she exposes herself to the gaze of a frustrated and yearning audience, consists of the artful awareness that at that moment they are comparing her with their familiar fare, and so her triumph consists also in the humiliation of others, while the pleasure of those who watch consists mainly of their own humiliation, felt, suffered, and accepted as the essence of the ritual.
    ...metaphysically the striptease leads the spectator to compare the pleasures at his disposal with those that by their nature he cannot have: his reality compared with the ideal, his women compared with Womanhood, his experience of sex compared with Sex, the nudes he possesses compared with the hyperuranian Nudity he will never know.  Afterward, he will have to go back to the cave and be content with the shadows on the wall: those are granted to him.
    Umberto Eco, "Socratic Striptease", Misreadings

Ideology?  If there is one:  Accept what is given and use it as a tool of persuasive argumentation.  The most recent, infamous handbook by this Aristotle, Rhetoric, is nothing less than a catechism of marketing, a motivational inquiry into what appeals and what doesn't, what's believed and what's rejected.  Now you know the irrational stimuli that govern the actions of your fellows, he says, and therefore your fellows are at your mercy.  Push their buttons:  they are yours.
    —Umberto Eco, "The End Is at Hand", Misreadings

He never had to insist on an order and never thought to insist, because he couldn’t imagine anyone refusing.  He couldn’t imagine anything disagreeable, in fact, and carried himself through every danger as if it had nothing to do with him.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Casualty”, The Night in Question

I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it.  And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Powder”, The Night in Question

I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me.  And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed, and in failing opened up the view of a world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Flyboys”, The Night in Question

Gilbert believed disillusionment to be the natural consequence, even the duty, of a mind that could cut through the authorized version to the true nature of things.  He made it his business to take nothing on trust, to respect not authority but that of his own judgement, and to be elegantly unsurprised at the grossest crimes and follies, especially those of the world’s anointed.
    ...He couldn’t be facetious with Mary Ann.  She always thought he meant exactly what he said, and then he had to stop and try to explain that he’d actually meant something else.  His irony began to sound weak and somehow envious.  It sounded thin and unmanly.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Two Boys and a Girl”, The Night in Question

Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Two Boys and a Girl”, The Night in Question

We’re supposed to smile at the passions of the young, and at what we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we’d fooled ourselves with and then wised up to.  Not only the passion of boys and girls for each other the others, too — passion for justice, for doing right, for turning the world around.  All these come in their time under our wintry smiles.  Yet there was nothing foolish about what we felt.  Nothing merely young.  I just wasn’t up to it.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Smorgasbord”, The Night in Question

Perhaps too little attention is paid to the necessary preconditions of “falling in love” — I mean the state of mind or place that precedes one’s first sight of the loved person (or house or land).
    —Alice Adams, “Roses, Rhododendron”

...looking back to Emily’s face, Emily looking at Lawrence, I can see that pained watchfulness of a woman who has been hurt, and by a man who could always hurt her again.
        —Alice Adams, “Roses, Rhododendron”

“Harry, why does your generation always have to find the right person?  Why can’t you learn to live with the wrong person?  Sooner or later everyone’s wrong.”
    —Charles Baxter, “Fenstad’s Mother”

Morality is character, character is that which is engraved; but the sand and the sea have no character and neither has abstract intelligence, for character is really inwardness.  Immorality, as energy, is also character; but to be neither moral nor immoral is merely ambiguous, and ambiguity enters into life when the qualitative distinctions are weakened by a gnawing reflection.  The revolt of the passions is elemental, the dissolution brought about by ambiguity is a silent sorites that goes on night and day.  The distinction between good and evil is enervated by a superficial, superior and theoretical knowledge of evil, and by a supercilious cleverness which is aware that goodness is neither appreciated nor worth while in this world, that it is tantamount to stupidity.  No one is any longer carried away by the desire for the good to perform great things, no one is precipitated by evil into atrocious sins, and so there is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason people gossip all the more, since ambiguity is tremendously stimulating and much more verbose than rejoicing over goodness or repentance over evil.
    The springs of life, which are only what they are because of the qualitative differentiating power of passion, lose their elasticity.  The distance separating a thing from its opposite in quality no longer regulates the inward relation of things.  All inwardness is lost, and to that extent the relation no longer exists.
    —Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

The first time they were alone together, Clyde laid his hands on Joan’s shoulders and kissed her, and she held herself steady, rising to the kiss, putting pressure against the mouth of this man who was virtually a stranger to her so that it was life an exchange, a handshake, between equals.
    —Joyce Carol Oates, “The Swimmers”

“What I hate about being my age is how nice everyone tries to be.  I was never nice, but now everybody is pelting me with sugar cubes.”
        —Charles Baxter, “Fenstad’s Mother”

My shadow took fright at the moon and huddled between my feet.
    —Italo Calvino, “The Man Who Shouted Teresa”

Everybody is always saying how great it is that human beings are so adaptable, but I don’t know.  A friend of mine was in the Navy and he told me that in Amsterdam, Holland, they have a whole section of town where you can walk through and from the street you can see women siting in rooms, waiting.  If you want one of them you just go in and pay, and they close the drapes.  This is nothing special to the people who live in Holland.  In Istanbul, Turkey, my friend saw a man walking down the street with a grand piano on his back.  Everyone moved around him and kept going.  It’s awful, what we get used to.
    —Tobias Wolff, “Next Door”

Erasmus is turning into such an odd little kid.  He’s glum.  He acts like I’m too crazy for the both of us, like I’ve used up all the craziness he could ever dare to be.
    —Mary Overton, “Letter to Ellen”

Brooke decided not to tell his wife what he had done.  In the past she had known everything about him, and it pleased him to be the man she thought him to be.  Now he was different from what his wife thought, and if he were honest he would hurt her terribly.  Brooke thought he had no right to do this.  He would have to pretend that things were the same.  He owed her that.  It seemed hypocritical to him, but he could not think of a better way to settle the matter.
    And Brooke’s wife, unpacking his clothes, smelled perfume on his necktie.  Then she went through the laundry hamper and discovered the same heavy scent all over one of his shirts.  There had to be an explanation, nut no matter how long she sat on the edge of the bed and held her head in her hands and rocked back and forth she could not imagine what it might be.  And her husband was so much himself that night, so merry and warm, that she felt unworthy of him.  The doubt passed from her mind to her body; it became one of those flutters that stops you cold from time to time for a few years, and then goes away.
    Tobias Wolff, “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke”

We love the ones we love and I don’t know why it has to be a matter of discussion...I don’t know why everyone can’t have whomever they love.
    —Alice Mattison, “Sebastian Squirrel”

“For a long time we had no real concept of time, and now we have it measured and logged down, and yet it’s affected by gravity, it’s affected by the rotation of the earth.  Time is different on Jupiter than it would be here, but we run our entire lives by it, and it strikes me that we run our lives by stories as well.  For example, when we dream, we want to explain our dream.  Dreams are pretty nonsensical when we first wake up, and yet the more we tell them, the more they start to fall into a story...That dreams are outside of is also amazing — you can fall asleep for a few minutes, seconds really, and time will stand still.  It’s the same with a story...
    —from an interview with George Clark in Glimmer Train

Some people say I was thinking too much and some people say I wasn’t thinking enough, but I probably just wasn’t thinking about the right things.
    —Jason Brown, “Driving the Heart”

I am a faithful man, for all my suspicions.  Too faithful, maybe.  I am ready to give too much, and maybe that’s the problem.
    —Robert Olen Butler, “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”

“Maybe that’s what falling in love means — the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”
    —Stuart Dybek, “Paper Lantern”

I loved Mitch because we could go for months without arguing.  I loved him because we could argue without making up in bed.  I loved him because we could do our laundry on Friday night and call it a date...I loved him because it was easy.
    —Deborah Gaylan, “The Incredible Appearing Man”

Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle.  We were people who got on with things.
    —Mary Gordon, “Intertextuality”

I watched her today as she brought water up the hill from the well.  One moment she stopped to rest her pail on the ground, and the wind blew and pressed her dress back against her.  The cat ran to her, and she picked it up and put it against her shoulder, and too up her pail and walked on.  You are giving away forty years of sleep beside this girl.
    —Anna Keesey, “Bright Winter”

You have called us graceless, and we have plucked up that name and wear it.
    —Anna Keesey, “Bright Winter”

And this beauty, when I first saw it — I saw it in parts, not all at once — made me glad to be alive, and I could not explain it, this feeling of happiness, gladness, at the sight of the new and the strange, the unfamiliar; and then, long, long after, when those things had become a part of me, a part of my everyday life, this feeling of happiness was no longer possible.  But I would yearn for it — to feel new again, to feel the irritation of the new again, to feel within myself a fountain of joy springing up from this irritation.  I long now to feel fresh again, to feel I will never die, but that is not possible.  I can only long for it; I can never be that way again.
    —Jamaica Kincaid, “In Rouseau”

He imprinted himself on her, until his ideas took up space in her head and her own voice always seemed to be asking a hopeful, anxious question...She thought being in love was the most important thing she could ever do.
    —Jean Thompson, “All Shall Love Me and Despair”

It was important that she be there for him to ignore.
    —Jean Thompson, “All Shall Love Me and Despair”

She wanted him to say anything at all.  It wasn’t fair that she had to keep doing and saying everything, waiting not to be ignored, calling him back from deep water.
    —Jean Thompson, “All Shall Love Me and Despair”

“Maybe the dust is settling,” Jean says.  “At first it’s just impact.  She’s left.  Boom.  It’s event.  You can tell everyone, crack open those fortune cookies, go see the astrologer.  It’s almost as though the relationship is still going on, even though Roxanne is not there.  Then with time, the worse truth settles in.  It’s no longer an event; it’s a permanent state of omission.”
    —Carol Anshaw, “Elvis Has Left the Building”

What he liked about the idea of falling — he had no intention of jumping, he was sure of that — was that shortly after hitting the water he would be somewhere.  Not just in the river, which wouldn’t matter, but someplace else.
    —Tony Earley, “Bridge”

He wonders what you do with love when you’re done with it — where do you put it, where does it go, how do you make sure it stays there?
    —Diane Schoemperlen, “Body Language”

“I only want to be able to look all around, to have it be open, to look everywhere around me and see just the empty land.  No skinny legs in hiking boots, no forest service signs, no motor lodges or gas stations or any shit like that.  Just empty and clean.  All mine, with no one comin’ across the horizon to find me.  Just me alone.”
    “You’re right not to want the trash,” the woman calls up to him, drawing a line with her boot tip in the powder dry earth.  “But everyone who loves the land has a place on it.  Do you love it?  Or do you just want to see emptiness everywhere around you like the emptiness you see inside?  Do you want it to be open land, Henry, or barren?”
    —Constance Higdon, “The Chicken Man”

Beauty is a perversion — how can you retain your self-respect when you talk about it?
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

There is a person like that in every family, and all the rest of us are just padding.
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

Chance is an evil and loathsome power; it’s best to put as little trust in it as possible.  But it’s generous, and there’s no other force or authority that states so clearly that everything is undeserved, and this we can also hope to receive much more in the future.  The only thing chance demands is that we should be humble.
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

“Authenticity is a quality of the work of art, it has nothing to do with who created it”
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

“Even when we have achieved the utmost perfection we are still  vain,” he said.  “We never learn to wear our genius with humility.”
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

The world she lived in was like that: nothing existed in itself, everything represented something else.  I had never told her how deeply I hated that world.
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

it’s always much easier to remember an effect than a cause.  Chance is perhaps no more than the sum of all the causes that we’ve forgotten.
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

“Questions about authentic and fake will follow us into death,” he said.
    “If we don’t somehow manage to escape,” I said.  “And put both authenticity and falsehood behind us.”
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

“People really don’t have any objective appearance,” said the plastic surgeon.  “Appearance is merely something we imagine.”
    —Torgny Lindgren, In Praise of Truth

“Sometimes either way you choose is gonna be bad.”
    —Megan Randall, “Majesty Justifies”

I want more.  I’m angry.  I don’t understand how this man can give so little and suck so much emotion while masquerading indifference.
    —A.A. Hedge Coke, “The Sun and Moon over Jasper (and Lucy)”

Libby was filled with desire for things she would never feel, people she would never know, a desire that suggested there was too much to feel, too much she couldn’t have.
    —Garnett Kilberg Cohen, “Where You Can’t Touch Bottom”

It’s important to have clean money — not new, but well maintained.
    —David Sedaris, “chipped beef” from Naked

“I don’t know how it happened, but you’re mine.  If that’s a big disappointment for you, just imagine what I must feel.”
    —David Sedaris, “chipped beef” from Naked

It wasn’t that I enjoyed pressing my nose against the scalding hood of a parked car — pleasure had nothing to do with it.  A person had to do these things because nothing was worse than the anguish of not doing them.
    —David Sedaris, “a plague of tics” from Naked

I quit taking their tests and completing their homework assignments, accepting Fs rather than delivering the grades I thought might promote their reputations as good teachers.  It was a strategy that hurt only me, but I thought it cunning.
    —David Sedaris, “i like guys” from Naked

Watching him was like opening the door to a singing telegram: you know it’s supposed to be entertaining, but you can’t get beyond the sad fact that this person actually things he’s bringing some joy into your life.
    —David Sedaris, “the drama bug” from Naked

Every gathering has its moment.  As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow...At the time, though, I still believed that such a warm and heady feeling might last forever and that in embracing it fully, I might approximate the same wistful feeling adults found in their second round of drinks.
    David Sedaris, “dinah, the christmas whore” from Naked

Unlike the rest of them, I had places to go, real places.  People were waiting for me to enrich their lives.  Couldn’t anyone see that?
    —David Sedaris, “c.o.g.” from Naked

I had never so much as organized a dinner party, but surely that would change as soon as my fellow workers recognized my way with words and the natural leadership qualities I had suppressed in the name of humility.  I’d always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted, empty lives.
    —David Sedaris, “c.o.g.” from Naked

This was a world where people were enlightened by a single word or deed.  Lessons were learned and lives were changed over the course of twenty-three minutes.  Even as a child I had trouble accepting the concept of such rapid spiritual growth.  If it were that easy to change people, surely I would be sitting upon a padded velvet throne before a nation of willing servants.  Who didn’t want to change people?
    —David Sedaris, “something for everyone” from Naked

“No booze,” Lisa had announced the week before the ceremony.  “Bob and I have decided we don’t want that kind of a wedding.”
    “Which kind?” my mother asked.  “The happy kind?  You and Bob might be thrilled to death, but the rest of us will need some help working up the proper spirit.”
    —David Sedaris, “ashes” from Naked

I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother.  It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV.  I think it was their fortitude that frightened us.  Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked.  Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without our complaints, there was nothing to say.
    —David Sedaris, “ashes” from Naked

When arguing, it was always his tactic to deny the validity of our requests.  If you wanted, say, a stack of pancakes, he would tell you not that you couldn’t have them but that you never really wanted them in the first place.
    —David Sedaris, “ashes” from Naked

My mother stopped listening years ago, but it was almost a comfort that my father insisted on business as usual, despite the circumstances.  In him, she had found someone whose behavior would never vary.  He had made a commitment to make her life miserable, and no amount of sickness would sway him from that task.
    —David Sedaris, “ashes” from Naked

I hated saying good-bye to all my wonderful new show business friends but it was time to go so Brandon led me out the door to our waiting limo.  And just as I was settling into the back seat I saw Barbara Streisand turn to Vincent Price and say, "I like that kid.  He's a survivor."
    So are you, Barbara.  So are you.
    —David Sedaris, "Don's Story" from Barrel Fever

I have tapes of myself calling in on "Larry King Live!" and speaking personally to such guests as Ed Meese, Tommy Smothers, Bob Hope, and Jim Brady both before and after the accident.  Which was the better conversation?  You be the judge.  The local radio hosts can recognize me by voice, and respect the way I have of challenging their guests.  It isn't easy to get through to any of these shows, but if you are persistent and have something to say, then you'll find a way to voice your opinion.
    I often try and encourage Dawn to call a few shows and speak her mind about the issues.  Stupid me, waste of time.  Dawn doesn't even know what the issues are.  She would sit glued to the television set or else she'd try and hog the phone, making calls to her so-called friends.  I sometimes just want to shake the life out of her, to point at the radio waves in the night sky and tell her that, Goddamn it, people are thinking out there.
    —David Sedaris, "Music for Lovers" from Barrel Fever

...Gill said, "I really started thinking about my life."  Then he started magnifying everything, which is a big mistake because if you think too hard about anything it's bound to take the fun out of it.
    —David Sedaris, "Barrel Fever" from Barrel Fever

...nothing gets on my nerves more than someone repeating the same phrase twice.  I think it's something people have picked up from television, this emotional stutter.  Rather than say something interesting once, they repeat a cliché and hope for the same effect.
    —David Sedaris, "Barrel Fever" from Barrel Fever

The blinds weren't coming clean the way I'd hoped so I added some Clorox to the mixture, a stupid thing to do.  The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I've discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, "I want to live, I want to live..."
    —David Sedaris, "The Curley Kind" from Barrel Fever

I guess I’m just a lucky so and so.
    —Ella Fitzgerald, “I Guess I’m Just a Lucky So and So"

Half a love is worse than none.
    —Ella Fitzgerald, “Don’t You Think I Ought to Know?”

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?  Where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?  Where have they gone, those leafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?  Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

“The dancer wants to look moral because his big audience is naïve and considers moral acts beautiful.”
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his own children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
    Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.  As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life.  This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

"Anyone who dislikes dancers and wants to denigrate them is always going to come up against an insuperable obstacle: their decency; because with his constant exposure to the public, the dancer condemns himself to being irreproachable; he hasn’t made a pact with the Devil like Faust, he’s made one with the Angel: he seeks to make his life a work of art, and that’s the job the Angel helps him with; because don’t forget, dancing is an art!  That obsession with seeing his own life as containing the stuff of art is where you find the true essence of the dancer; he doesn’t preach morality, he dances it!  He hopes to move and dazzle the world with the beauty of his life! "
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

“I think it not only possible but probable that a true dancer...would in the presence of a woman be devoid of any desire to show off and seduce...Because the audience he’s looking to seduce is not a few specific and visible women, it’s the great throng of invisible people!...He’s showing off not for you or for me but for the whole world.  And what is the whole world?  An infinity with no faces!  An abstraction.”
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

Why did she tell him she hadn’t brought the key?  Why did she not tell him right off that the pavilion was no longer kept locked?  Everything is composed, confected, artificial, everything is staged, nothing is straightforward, or in other words, everything is an art.
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory.  For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory.
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.  Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street.  At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him.  Automatically, he slows down.  Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
    In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

There was one kind of fame from before the invention of photography, and another kind thereafter.  The Czech king Wenceslaus, in the fourteenth century, liked to visit the Prague inns and chat incognito with the common folk.  He had power, fame, liberty.  Prince Charles of England has no power, no freedom, but enormous fame: neither in the virgin forest nor in his bathtub hidden away in a bunker seventeen stories underground can he escape the eyes that pursue and recognize him. 
    ...fame concerns not only the famous people, it concerns everyone.  These days, famous people are in magazines, on television screens, they invade everyone’s imagination.  And everyone considers the possibility, be it only in dreams, of becoming the object of such fame (not the fame of King Wenceslaus who went visiting taverns but that of Prince Charles hidden away in his bathtub seventeen stories underground).  The possibility shadows every single person and changes the nature of his life; for (and this is another well-known axiom of existential mathematics) any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

A word uttered in a small enclosed space has a different meaning from the same word resonating in an amphitheater.  No longer is it a word for which he holds full responsibility and which is addressed exclusively to the partner, it is a word that other people demand to hear, people who are there, looking at them.  True, the amphitheater is empty, but even though it is empty, the audience, imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual, is there, is with them.
    —Milan Kundrea, Slowness

It's a long way down, aren’t you tired of this?
    —Emmett Swimming, “Long Way Down”

We are underused.
    —Pavement, “We Are Underused”

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.
    —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“he has won his bride at last, poor boy, not here but in the houses of the dead.”
    —Sophocles, Antigone

one cannot so well recognize a thing and make it one’s own, when it has been learned from another, as when one has himself discovered it.
    —Descartes, Discourse on Method

...and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something.
    —Descartes, Meditations (II)

Today anyone can write a reasonably good article on anything; but no one wants or is able to sustain the strenuous effort of thinking just one single thought through to its finest conclusions. Instead, what is appreciated today is the writing of trivia, and for anyone to write a large book is to go so far almost as to invite ridicule. Formerly people read large books and if one did read pamphlets or periodicals, one didn’t quite like to admit it. Now everyone feels it their duty to read whatever there is in a periodical or pamphlet, but is ashamed to have read a big book through to the end for fear of being thought narrow—minded.
    —Kierkegaard, JP, 46VII I A 13

To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.
    —Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

I’ve systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning.  How to renounce.
    —Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

I can hear something.  It’s coming from inside me, and it’s a whimper.  It’s the fear that what has been given to me won’t last.
    —Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Deficiency in judgment is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy.
    —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes.  He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas.  Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas.  It smelled pleasantly of canvas.  Already there was something mysterious and homelike.  Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent.  He had not been unhappy all day.  This was different though.  Now things were done.  There had been this to do.  Now it was done.  It had been a hard trip.  He was very tired.  That was done/  He had made his camp.  He was settled.  Nothing could touch him.  It was a good place to camp.  He was there, in the good place.  He was in his home where he had made it.  Now he was hungry.
    —Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"

"You got a real mean sense of humor, sweetheart.  I'm starting to feel real sorry for you, and that's a deadly, final thing to feel for a man — it's a lot worse than bein' mad."
    —Alison Moore, "Snakewoman"

If there is another thing I've learned is that shit work like this — labor for now important purpose — dulls the human spirit and lays waste to the soul.
    —Brian Fleming, "What I Can Tell You"

"Please don't take this the wrong way, but you look lovely today.  If I were younger and I weren't married...but I'm faithful to my wife, you see, and she is the nearest thing to proof of the existence of God in my life."
    "That's a really sweet thing to say.  Does she know that?"  Handing back my change she let her fingers touch my palm for a moment in a way more comforting that I hope she will ever know.
    "Soon enough," I said.
    —Brian Fleming, "What I Can Tell You"

What a screwed-up night.  I was never going to get to San Diego.  I was never going to be one of those women you saw striding along the beach with their hair in attractive windblown tangles, or sitting handsomely on the terrace beneath the bougainvillea.  I was one of those women who gets befriended by freaks.
    —Jean Thompson, "Crash"

She's more than pretty, she's striking.  She's accustomed to appreciative looks, in the way beautiful women are.  From everyone, she thinks, except Dennis, who has stopped seeing her.  She has become familiar, comfortable, named.  Alice.  Wife.  Nothing left to discover.
    —Genni Gunn, "Los Desperados"

In the ancient world, exile was considered equivalent to the death penalty because the individual would be cut off from home and family permanently.  But the offender does not suffer alone.  Suppose Dennis' exile becomes a freedom?  His pain a joy?  His temporariness, a permanence?
    —Genni Gunn, "Los Desperados"

He felt quite wrong, almost ridiculous.  It came to him with a strange heat in his face and neck that he was going to have to go on being who he was.
    —Richard Bausch, "Valor"

A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed.  The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed.  A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head...
    —Lichtenberg, A20

The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are often made aloud.
    —Lichtenberg, A22

Philosophy is, by its very nature, something esoteric, neither made for the vulgar as it stands, nor capable of being got up to suit the vulgar taste; it only is philosophy in virtue of being directly opposed to the understanding and hence even more opposed to healthy common sense, under which label we understand the limitedness in space and time of a race of men; in its relationship to common sense the world of philosophy is in and for itself an inverted world.
    —Hegel, The Critical Journal

To invent new words where the language already has no lack of expressions for given concepts is a childish effort to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts yet by new patches on an old garment.
    —Kant, KdpV, S:10

"Trying is the first step toward failure."
    —Homer Simpson

"The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority.  Here was a person for whom the work pen had two syllables.  Her people undoubtedly frank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready — so who was she to advise me on anything?"
    —David Sedaris, "Go Carolina" Me Talk Pretty One Day

During the first week of September, it was my family's habit to rent a beach house on Ocean Isle, a thin strip of land off the coast of North Carolina.  As youngsters, we participated in all the usual seaside activities — which were fun, until my father got involved and systematically chipped away at our pleasure.  Miniature golf was ruined with a lengthy dissertation on impact, trajectory, and wind velocity, and our sand castles were critiqued with stifling lectures on the dynamics of the vaulted ceiling.  We enjoyed swimming, until the mystery of the tides was explained in such a way that the ocean seemed nothing more than an enormous saltwater toilet, flushing itself on a sad and predictable bases.
    By the time we reached our teens, we were exhausted.  No longer interested in the water, we joined our mother on the beach blanket and dedicated ourselves to the higher art of tanning.  Under her guidance, we learned which lotions to start off with, and what worked best for various weather conditions and times of day.  She taught us that the combination of false confidence and Hawaiian Tropic could result in a painful and unsightly burn, certain to subtract valuable points when, on the final night of vacations, contestants gathered for the annual Miss Emollient Pageant.  This was a contest judged by our mother, in which the holder of the darkest tan was awarded a crown, a sash, and a scepter.
    —David Sedaris, "Genetic Engineering" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

I tried to creep by unnoticed, but he stopped me, claiming that I was just the fellow he'd been looking for.  "Do you have any idea how many grains of sand there are in the world?" he asked.  It was a question that had never occurred to me.  Unlike guessing the number of pickled eggs in a jar or the amount of human brains it might take to equal the weight of a portable television set, this equation was bound to involve the hateful word googleplex, a term I'd heard him use once of twice before.  It was an idea of a number and was, therefore, of no use whatsoever.
    —David Sedaris, "Genetic Engineering" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever.
    —David Sedaris, "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

True art was based on despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.
    —David Sedaris, "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me.  Speed eliminates all doubt.  Am I smart enough?  Will people like me?  Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?  These are questions for insecure potheads.  A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant.  The upswing is that, having eliminated the need for both eating and sleeping, you have a full twenty-four hours a day to spread your charm and talent.
    —David Sedaris, "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

At the next group meeting it was suggested that the museum had accepted my work only because it was decorative and east to swallow.  My friends could have gotten in had they compromised themselves, but unlike me, some people had integrity.
    —David Sedaris, "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

I might have thrown myself out the window, but I lived on the first floor and didn't have the energy to climb the stairs to the roof.
    —David Sedaris, "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

...our speech was monitored for the slightest hint of a Raleigh accent.  Use the work "y'all," and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat.  Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.
    —David Sedaris, "You Can't Kill the Rooster" from  Me Talk Pretty One Day

The cat was put down, and then came a series of crank phone calls and anonymous postcards orchestrated by my sisters and me.  The cards announced a miraculous new cure for feline leukemia, and the callers identified themselves as representatives from Cat Fancy magazine.  "We'd like to use Sadie as our September cover story and were hoping to schedule a photo shoot as soon as possible.  Do you think you could have her ready by tomorrow?"
    —David Sedaris, "The Youth in Asia" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

As a rule, I'm no great fan of eating out in New York restaurants.  It's hard to love a place that's outlawed smoking but finds it perfectly acceptable to serve raw fish in a bath or chocolate.  there are no more normal restaurants left, at least in our neighborhood.  The diners have all been taken over by precious little bistros boasting a menu of indigenous American cuisine.  They call these meals "traditional," yet they're rarely the American dishes I remember.  The patty melt has been pushed aside in favor of the herb-encrusted medallions of baby artichoke hearts, which never leave me thinking, Oh, right, those!  I wonder if they're as good as the ones my mom used to make.
    Part of the problem is that we live in the wrong part of town...This is where the world's brightest young talents come to braise caramelized racks of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased with a warm spray of clarified musk oil.  Even when they promise something simple, they've got to tart it up — the meatloaf has been poached in sea water, or there are figs in the tuna salad.  If cooking is an art, I think we're in our Dada phase.
    I've never thought of myself as a particularly finicky eater, but it's hard to be a good sport when each dish seems to include no fewer than a dozen ingredients, one of which I'm bound do dislike.  I'd order the skirt steak with a medley of suffocated peaches, but I'm put off by the aspirin sauce.  The sea scallops look good until I'm told they're served in a broth of malt liquor and mummified litchi nuts.  What I really want is a cigarette, and I'm always searching the menu in the hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable.  Bake it, steam it, grill it, or stuff it into littleneck clams, I just need something familiar that I can hold on to.
    —David Sedaris, "Today's Special" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

I've never known anyone so willing to withhold judgment and overlook what often strike me as major personality defects.  Like all my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.
    —David Sedaris, "City of Angels" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

My father has always placed a great deal of importance on his daughters' physical beauty.  It is, to him, their greatest asset, and he monitors their appearance with the intensity of a pimp.  What can I say?  He was born a long time ago and is convinced that marriage is a woman's only real shot at happiness.
    —David Sedaris, "A Shiner Like a Diamond" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

When it was her turn at the styling table, Amy said, "I want it to look like someone has beaten the shit out of me."
    The makeup artist did a fine job.  The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by an arrangement of scratch marks on her forehead.  Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.
    Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be.  Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store.  Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, "I'm in love.  Can you believe if?  I'm finally, totally in love, and I feel great."
    —David Sedaris, "A Shiner Like a Diamond" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing...My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily.  I'm comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.
    —David Sedaris, "Nutcracker.com" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

Unlike the faint scurry raised by fingers against a plastic computer keyboard, the smack and clatter of a typewriter suggests that you're actually building something.  At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.
    —David Sedaris, "Nutcracker.com" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire.  Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness.  There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.
    —David Sedaris, "See You Again Yesterday" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

...I wouldn't have minded growing up with a houseful of servants.  In North Carolina it wasn't unusual to have a once-a-week maid, but Hugh's family had houseboys, a word that never fails to charge my imagination.  They had cooks and drivers, and guards who occupied a gatehouse, armed with machetes.  Seeing as I had regularly petitioned my parents for an electric fence, the business with the guards strikes me as the last word in quiet sophistication.  Having protection suggests that you are important.  Having protection paid for by the government is even better, as it suggests your safety is of interest to someone other than yourself.
    —David Sedaris, "Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

Because they had used the tiresome word froggy and complained about my odor, I was now licensed to hate this couple as much as I wanted.  This made me happy, as I'd wanted to hate them from the moment I'd entered the subway car and seen them hugging the pole.
    —David Sedaris, "Picka Pocketoni" Me Talk Pretty One Day

Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it's funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own.  Often I never even made it to bed.  I'd squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes.  I'm now told that this is not called "going to sleep" but rather "passing out," a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.
    —David Sedaris, "The Late Show" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

Most important, I'm never seen as an underdog.  You have to care about something in order to hold that title, and I honestly don't give a damn one way or the other.
    —David Sedaris, "The Late Show" from Me Talk Pretty One Day

What peculiar privilege has this little agitator of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?
    —David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete exposition of its value.  For the faults are something particular and finite, which can therefore be taken in fully at a glance.  On the other hand, the very stamp that genius impresses on its works is that their excellence is unfathomable and inexhaustible, and therefore they do not become obsolete, but are the instructors of many succeeding centuries.
    —Schopenhauer, "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy"

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love — all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.
    —Katherine Anne Porter, "Theft"

The plane taxied into position, turned, the propellers whirled until in the arc lights of the field they were great silver disks, the motor roared, and the plane started that run down the filed that always, no matter how many times you had sat it out, no matter in how many countries, and no matter on how many fields, bad fields, dangerous fields, in whatever weather, always stopped your heart for one moment as you waited to see if this time it would work again; if this time, as all the other times, the enormous machine would rise smoothly into the air where no one really belonged except the birds.
    —Martha Gellhorn, "Miami-New York"

Father Malt...wisely renewed his thanks for the bag, insisting upon his indebtedness until it was actually in keeping with the idea the ushers had of their own generosity.
    —J.F. Powers, "Death of a Favorite"

After one last dirty look, I left them to themselves — to punish each other with their company.
    —J.F. Powers, "Death of a Favorite

She paints with lightning strokes that panorama of drudgery in which her youth, her beauty, and her wit have been lost.
    —John Cheever, "The Country Husband"

The realization of how many years had passed since he had enjoyed being deliberately impolite sobered him.  Among his friends and neighbors, there were brilliant and gifted people — he saw that — but many of them, also, were bores and fools, and he had made the mistake of listening to them all with equal attention.  He had confused a lack of discrimination with Christian love, and the confusion seemed general and destructive.
    —John Cheever, "The Country Husband"

She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.  She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.
    —Flannery O'Connor, "Greenleaf"

He didn't like anything.  He drove twenty miles every day to the university where he taught and twenty miles back every night, but he said he hated the twenty-mile drive and he hated the second-rate university and he hated the morons who attended it.  He hated the country and he hated the life he lived; he hated living with his mother and his idiot brother and he hated hearing about the damn dairy and the damn help and the damn broken machinery.  But in spite of all he said, he never made any move to leave.  He talked about Paris and Rome but he never even went to Atlanta.
    —Flannery O'Connor, "Greenleaf"

I curled myself around these dreams and began to be happy.
    —Philip Roth, "Defender of the Faith"

Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death.
    —Hume, Essays

He saw the men in the restaurant.  The criers, ignorant of hope, the kibitzers, ignorant of despair.  Each with his pitiful piece broken from the whole of life, confidently extending only half of what there was to give.
    —Stanley Elkin, "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers"

Even without going inside he knew familiarly what it would be like.  The criers and the kibitzers.  The criers, earnest, complaining with a peculiar vigor about their businesses, their gas mileage, their health; their despair articulate, dependably lamenting their lives, vaguely mourning conditions, their sorrow something they could expect no one to understand.  The kibitzers, deaf to grief, winking confidentially at the others, their voices high-pitched in kidding or lowered in conspiracy to tell of triumphs, of men they knew downtown, of tickets fixed, or languishing goods moved suddenly and unexpectedly, or the windfall that was life; their fingers sticky, smeared with the sugar from their rolls.
    —Stanley Elkin, "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers"

What could I tell him?  Was it good news to be alive?  Who could argue the point?
    —Bernard Malamud, "The German Refugee"

My speculation was the old one: Not all drown in this ocean, why does he?
    —Bernard Malamud, "The German Refugee"

"How do you do it, Homer, how do you silence that voice that says, 'think'?"    —Ned Flanders
"Trying is the first step toward failure."
    —Homer Simpson

The Miracle of the One that the alchemists sought is not so very far from the infant theory of hyperspace, where all the seeming dislocations and separations of the atomic and sub-atomic worlds are unified into a co-operating whole.  This is not possible in three spatial dimensions or even in four.  Ten, at least, lure us out of what we know.
    Star-dust that were are, will death lose its string?  Theoretically there will be no death, only an exchange of energy into what is likely to be another dimension.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Have pity on this small blue planet searching through time and space.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

I cannot tell you who I am unless I tell you why I am.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known.  I interpret the world by confusing other poeple's psychology with my own.  I am open-minded but what I think is.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

When children learn to count they naturally add and multiply.  Subtraction and division are harder to teach them, perhaps because reducing the world is an adult skill.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet.  Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another.  The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life.
    Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat.
    In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.
    His wife, his mistress, met.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Past.  Present.  Future.  The rational divisions of the rational life.  And always underneath, in dreams, in recollections, in the moment of hesitation on a busy street, the hunch that life is not rational, not divided.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

He knows the first words of Creation, and nearly sees, but not, the number that hides beneath.  He hears the Word and tries to write the number but not all numbers are his.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

I know I am a fool, trying to make connections out of scraps but how else is there to proceed?  The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery.  Perhaps it is a vanity.  Am I vain enough to assume you will understand me?  No.  So I go on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one piece will slide smooth against the next.
    Walk with me.  Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning.  Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall.  And if we pull away the panelling, then what?  Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation?  How will I come to read the rawness inside?
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head.  But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously?  I cannot assume you will understand me.  It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.  Some story we must have.  Stray words on crumpled paper.  A weak signal into the outer space of each other.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Perhaps I was trying to hold together my own world that was in so much danger of falling away.  Perhaps I wanted order where there was none.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

What we know doesnot satisfy us.  What we know constantly reveals itself as partial.  What we know, generation by generation, is discarded into new knowings which in their turn slowly cease to interest us.
    In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections.  Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.  A release of energy from one site to another.  Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and through time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.
        —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

GUTs had their heart in the right place; they wanted to recognise the true relationship between the three fundamental forces.  Now, more than ever, crossing into the twenty-first century, our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship.  This is more than a scientist's credo.  The separateness of our lives is a sham.  Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

There are children who grow up as I did, with the love clamped down in them, who cannot afterwards love at all.  There are others who make fools of themselves, loving widely, indiscreetly, forgetting it is themselves they are trying to love back to a better place.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

If Superstring theory is correct there is no table.  There is no basic building block, no firm stable first principle on which to pile the rest.  The cups and saucers are in the air, the cloth levitating under them, the table itself is notional, we would feel uncomfortable eating out dinner without it, in fact it is a vibration as unsolid as ourselves.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

My father was his own conjuring trick; the impression of something solid when what was solid had vanished away.  He had become his clothes.  He had become his job.  It was as though he had tunnelled into another life without telling anyone, including.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Infinite grace.  Infinite possibility.  The mercy of the universe extended in its own laws.  According to quantum theory there are not only second chances, multiple chances.  Space is not simply connected.  History is not unalterable.  The universe itself is forked.  If we knew how to manipulate space-time as space-time manipulates itself the illusion of our single linear lives would collapse.  And if our lives here are not the total our death here will not be final.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

As an armchair atheist I stumble into God as soon as I get up and walk.  I do not know what God is, but I use it as a notational value.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

The property of matter and light is very strange.  How can we accept that everything can be, at the same time, an entity confined in voluem (a particle) and a wave spread out over huge regions of space?  This is one of the paradoxes if quantum theory, or as the Hindu mystics put it centuries ago, 'smaller than small, bigger than big.'  We are and we are not our bodies.
    If we accept Hawking's idea that we should treat the entire universe as a wave function, both specifically located and infinite, then that function is the sum of all possible universes, dead, alive, multiple, simultaneous, interdependent, co-existing.  Moreover, 'we' and the sum universe cannot be separated in the way of the old Cartesian dialectic of 'I' and 'World'.  Observer and observed are part of the same process.  What did Paracelsus say?  'The galaxa goes through the belly.'
    What is it that you contain?  The dead, time, light patterns of millenia, the expanding universe opening in your gut.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split.  I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth.  Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached.
    —Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Life is a sorry business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.
    —Schopenhauer

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. But for that we should feel sorry rather than angry.
    —Pascal

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
    —William James

And then one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.  This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
    Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.
    This is not her story
    —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one—more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person Anyway?
    —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so."
    —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
    "The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
    " 'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it?  It could not have evolved by chance.  It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't.  Q.E.D.'
    " 'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
    " 'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing.
    "Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best selling-book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God."
        —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.
        —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.  For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars, and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.  But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
        —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"...it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous  amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general.  Everyone's going to have their own theories about what answer I'm eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves?  So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life.  How does that sound?"
        —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted, "We don't demand solid facts!  What we demand is a total absence of solid facts.  I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!"
    "But who the devil are you?" exclaimed an outraged Fook.
    "We," said Majikthise, "are Philosophers."
    "Though we may not be," said Vroomfondel, waving a warning finger at the programmers.
    "Yes, we are," insisted Majikthise.  "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!"
    "What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.
    "I'll tell you what the problem is, mate," said Mijikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"
    "We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"
    "You just let these machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much.  You want to check your legal position, you do, mate.  Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers.  Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job, aren't we?  I mean, what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
    "That's right," shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
        —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This was the gist of the notice.  It said "The Guide is definitive.  Reality is infrequently inaccurate."
    This has led to some interesting consequences.  For instance, when the ditors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had dies as a result of taking the entry on the Planet Traal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists" instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists"), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty part in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true.
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
    And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her.
    And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
    To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"Making it up? said Marvin, swiveling his head in a parody of astonishment.  "Why should I want to make anything up?  Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?"
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

    "Hey, er..." said Zaphod, "what's your name?"
    The man looked at them doubtfully.
    "I don't know.  Why, do you think I should have one?  It seems very odd to give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name."
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Zarniwoop pulled some notes out of a pocket.
"Now," he said, "you do rule the Universe, do you?"
"How can I tell?" said the amn.
Zarniwood ticked off a note on the paper.
"How long have you been doing this?"
"Ah," said the amn, "this is a question about the past, isn't it?"
Zarniwood looked at him in puzzlement.  This wasn't exactly what he'd been expecting.
"Yes," he said.
"How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

So things began to pall for him.  The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade.  He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.
    —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

"How can you have money," demanded Ford, "if none of you actually produces anything?  It doesn't grow on trees you know."
    "If you would allow me to contineu..."
    For nodded dejectedly.
    "Thank you.  Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich."
    Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
        —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

    "You have something on your mind, I think," said the mattress, floopily.
    "More than you can possibly imagine," dreared Marvin.  "My capacity for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinite reaches of space itself.  Except of course my capacity for happiness."
    Stomp, stomp, he went.
    "My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first."
    "...Why are you walking in circles?"
    "Because my leg is stuck," said Marvin simply.
    ...He stomped around again in his tiny circle, around his think steel peg-leg that revolved in the much but seemed otherwise stuck.
    "But why do you just keep walking round and round?" asked the mattress.
    "Just to make the point," said Marvin, and continued round and round.
    "Consider it made, my dear friend," flurbled the mattress, "consider it made."
    —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Just as a slow series of clicks when speeded up will lose the definition of each individual click and gradually take on the quality of a sustained and rising tone, so a series of individual impressions here took on the quality of a sustained emotion—and yet not an emotion.  If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one.  It was hatred, implacable hatred.  It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold.  It was impersonal, not like a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal.  And it was deadly, again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across an expressway is deadly.
        —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

"Imagine," he said, "never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be."
        —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

...once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
    —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
    The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved.  This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after teh show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.
    The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined asbeing anything other than itself.  In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive.  Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in the many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
    The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for.  (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.)
    The baffling discrepancies that used to occur at this opint remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously.  They were at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flahsiness, tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about on the following morning.  They were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because the never occurred in laboratories—not in reputable laboratories at least.
    And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:
    Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
    This single statement took the scientific world by storm.  It completely revolutionized it.  So many mathemtical conferences hot held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.
    Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood.  To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much like what the amn in the street would have said "Oh, yes, I could have told you that."  Then some phrases like "Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks" were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.
    —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

"The people of Krikkit," said His Hight Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, L.I.V.R. (the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed), Chairman of the Board of Judges at the Krikkit War Crimes Trial, "are, well, you know, they're just a bunch of real sweet guys, you know, who just happened to want to kill everybody.  Hell, I feel the same way some mornings.
    "Okay," he continued, swinging his feet up onto the bench in front of hi and pausing a moment to pick a thread off his Ceremonial Beach Loafers, "so you wouldn't necessarily want to share a Galazy with these guys."
        —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

    "but the question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.  All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
    Prak nodded again.
    "Forty-two," he said, "yes, that's right."
    He paused.  Shadows of thought and memory crossed his face like the shadows of clouds crossing the land.
    "I'm afraid," he said at last, "that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive.  Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other.  It si impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe."
    ..."Oh well," he said with resignation, "I was just hoping there would be some sort of reason."
    —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment.  "What on earth did you do?"
"Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do.  I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it."
    "What?  Why?"
    "Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained for, is it?  I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience, or even primal instincts to tell me how to reactto someone who has quite calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits.    "Well, you could..." Fenchurch thought about it.  "I must say I'm not sure what I would have done either.  So what happened?"
    "I stared furiously at the crossword," said Arthur, "couldn't do a single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so there was nothing for it.  I braced myself.  I took a biscuit, trying very hard not to notices," he added, "that the packet was myseteriously open..."
    "But you're fighting back, taking a tough line."
    "After my fashion, yes.  I ate the biiscuit.  I ate it very deliberately and visibly, so that he would have no doubt as to what I was doing.  When I eat a biscuit," said Arthur, "it stays eaten."
    —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

They stayed for one night in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard which someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.
    "Everyone there is either English or odd or both.  They've got a swimming pool where you can go and watch English rock stars reading Language, Truth, and Logic for the photographers."
        —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills along Mulholland Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later stopped to look across the dazzling sea of floating light that is the San Fernando Valley.  They agreed that the sense of dazzle stopped immediately at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other part of them and came away strangely unsatisfied by the spectacle.
    —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

    "I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an examplemof a Spntaneous Para-Causal Meterological Phenomenon."
    "Can you tell us what that means?"
    "I'm not altogether sure.  Let's be straight here.  If we find something we can't understand we like to call it something you can't understand, or indeed pronounce.  I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don't, and I'm afraid we couldn't have that.
    "No, first we have to call it something which says it's ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it's not what you said it is, but something we say it is.
    "And if it turns out that you're tight, you'll still be worong, because we will simply calll him a...er, 'Supernormal'—not parpanormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a 'Supernormal Incremental Preceipitation Inducer.'  We'll probably want to shove a 'Quasi' in there somewhere to protect ourselves..."
    —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right-thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right-thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.
    —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.  The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extreemly unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
    —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless




The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.
    It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you don't try to realize that until a little later, after you've realized that everything oyu've realized up to that moment is not true.
    The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash.  The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn't actually exist, either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.
    The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel.  It doesn't mean anything.  You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish MAsh any way you like and you will generall come up with something that someone will call home.
    —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

"You cannot see what I see because you see what you see.  You cannot know what I know because you know what you know.  What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind.  Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself."
    —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

    "Oh, all right," said the old man.  "Here's a prayer for you.  Got a pencil?"
    "Yes," said Arthur.
    "It goes like this.  Let's see now: 'Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know.  Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know.  Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about.  Amen.'  That's it.  It's what you pray for silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open."
    "Hmmm," said Arthur.  "Well, thank you—"
    "There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important," continued the old man, "so you'd better job this down, too."
    "Okay."
    "It goes, 'Lord, lord, lord...'  It's best to put that bit in just in case.  You can never be too sure.  'Lord, lor, lord.  Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.  Amen.'  And that's it.  Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part."
        —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
    —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless



It wasn't his job to worry about that, though.  It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job.  If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought, then it wasn't his job to worry about such things.  Any such things that came his way were referred to others, who had, in turn, other people to refer such things to."
    —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

One night on Cape Cod, when I was drunk and reeking of mustard gas and roses, and calling up old friends and enemies, as used to be my custom, I called up my beloved old thesis advisor. I was told he was dead - at the age of about fifty, I think. He had swallowed cyanide. He had not published. He had perished instead.

    —Kurt Vonnegut, "Palm Sunday"

Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade.  THe cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
    —Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Temporary Matter"

She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or drpping a letter in the mailbox.  It was a quality that he did not understand.  It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see.  He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression.
    —Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Temporary Matter"

I know that my achievement is quite ordinary.  I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first.  Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
    —Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Temporary Matter"

That year, I believed that if I could make sense of my worries, I could make them stop.
    —Amy Tan, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories  1999

I am still the same worrier I was as a child.  I still try to sort out my worries, categorize them, organize them, find possible solutions to contain them or make them go away.  And they still sit in my brain like a blood clot waiting to dissipate or explode.
    —Amy Tan, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories  1999



She could be a sculptor or some other kind of artist, in that she speaks of her work as if the dogs are rough blocks of stone whose internal form exists already and is waiting only to be chiseled free and then released by her, beautiful, into the world.
    —Rock Bass, "The Hermit's Story"

It would be curious to tally how many times any or all of us reject, or fail to observe, moments of grace.
    —Rock Bass, "The Hermit's Story"

A lot of time she Bartlesbys me, says, "No, I'd rather not."
    —Junot DÍaz, "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars

Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small.
    —Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

    "Bartleby," said I, "Ginger Nut is away; just step around to the Post Office, won't you?" (it was but a three minutes' walk), "and see if there is anything for me."
    "I would prefer not to."
    "You will not?"
    "I prefer not."
    —Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Every fifty feet there's at least one Eurofuck beached out on a towel like some scary pale monster that the sea's vomited up.  They look like philosophy professors, like budget Foucaults, and too many of them are in the company of a dark-assed Dominican girl.  I mean it, these girls can't be no more than sixteen, look puro ingenio to me.  You can tell by their inability to communicate that these two didn't meet back in their Left Bank days.
    —Junot DÍaz, "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars

    "Khoka," she says, calling him by a childhood name she hasn't used in years, "I could fry you two-three hot-hot luchis, if you like."  As she waits for his reply, she can feel, in the hollow of her throat, the rapid thud of her heart.  And when he says yes, that would be very nice, she shuts her eyes tight and takes a deep vreath, and it is as though merciful time has given her back her youth, that sweet, aching urgency of being needed again.
    —Chitra Divakaruni, "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter"
The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.  Yocheved touched a finger to her throat and turned her gaze toward the sky, wondering from where such a strange gift had come.
    Only Mendel looked back at the sound of the shot; the others had learned the lessons of Sodom.
    —Nathan Englander, "The Tumblers"


He was surprised, as always, to witness a new degradation, to find another display of wretchedness original enough to bring tears to his eyes.
    —Nathan Englander, "The Tumblers"

It was the efficiency displayed by each and everyone, the crack hop-to-it-ness, the discipline and order.  He had seen if from the start, from the day the intruders marched into town and, finding the square empty, began kicking down doors, from the instant meticulousness demanded that a war of such massive scope make time to seek out a happily isolated dot-on-the-map-hemlet-called-city where resided the fools of Chelm,  It was this efficiency, Mednel knew, that would catch up with them.
    —Nathan Englander, "The Tumblers"

He looked up on the balcony, stopping a moment to remember her father, a pale, overweight man with oiled hair who would sit in a ricker and yell after cars speeding in the dusty road, as though he could control the world with a mean word.
    —Tim Gautreaux, "The Piano Tuner"

The drug distanced him from the pain,threw a shimmering, transparent veil up through which he observed himself dying in a darkened room; he noted the pain, even acknowledged that it was his, without actually participating in it.
    —Melissa Hardy, "The Uncharted Heart"

I am dogless for the moment, but it's not my natural condition.  You never know when I might get overwhelmed by a desire to go to the pound.
    —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"

Guinevere is in love with a man in New York City who told her in a letter that the only thing bettwe than three thousand miles between him and the object of his desire would be if she had a terminal illness.  "I could really get behind a relationship with a woman who had only six months to live" was what he wrote.
    —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"

The last woman Leo called the love of his life only let him see her twice a week for three years.  She was a cardiologist who lived in the Marina who said she spent all day with broken hearts and she had no intention of filling her time off with her own.
    —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"

    "The great thing about Californians," Leo says when the woman has finally gotten up to leave, "is that they think it's perfectly okay to exhibit all their neuroses in public so long as they apologize for them first."
    —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"



"I'm so deeply afraid," Gordon had said on the docks out first night together, "that I am nothing but weak and worthless.  So I take the people close to me and try to break them, so they become as weak and worthless as me."
    I want to know the reason I could hear and didn't hear what he was saying, the reason that I thought the story could end differently for me.
    —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"

    "I saw who you preferred watching," gordon said as we arrived at the car and he slammed inside.
    "Gordon," I said, "I don't even know what that man looked like."
    The moon was fat and full over the parts of Oakland no one dares to go late at night, and I knew as I looked for a face in it that it didn't matter a bit what I said.
    Gordon liked to drive the meanest streets when he was feeling meanest, and he was ranting about my shaking my tail feathers and keeping my pants zipped, and all I could think to do was remind him I was wearing a skirt.
    He squealed the brakes at the end of my driveway, and I got out and moved toward the dark entryway.
    "Aren't you going to invite me in?" he asked.  And I thought about the months full of nights just like this one when I asked his forgiveness, when I begged him to stay.
        —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"

    "What I don't know," my father said, "is how a person with so little sense of repsonsibility gets a driver's license in this country to begin with."  He flicked the air vent open and closed, open and closed.  "I mean, you gotta wonder if she should even be let out of the house in the morning."
    "Why don't you just say it, Robert," my mother said.  "Say what you mean.  Say, Daughter, I hate you."  Her voice started shaking.  "Everybody sees it.  Everybody knows it.  Why don't you say it out loud?"
    "Ms. O'Rourke?" Officer Jenkins was back at the window.
    "Let's hear it," my mother went on.  "Officer, I hate my daughter."
    The cop's eyes flicked for a moment into the back seat.
    "According to the information I received, Ms. O'Rourke," Officer Jenkins said, "you are required to wear corrective lenses."
    "That's right," I said.
    "And you are wearing contacts now?"  There was something like hope in his voice.
    "No, sir."
    "She can't even lie?" my father asked.  "About one little thing?"
    "Okay, now, on three," my mother said.  "Daughter, I wish you had never been born."
    "Ms. O'Rourke," Officer Jenkins said, "I'm just going to give you a warning today."  My father bit off the end of a laugh.
    "Thank you very much," I said.
    "I hate to say this, Ms. O'Rourke," the cop said, "but there's nothing I could do to you that's going to feel like punishment."  He held out his hand for me to shake.  "You drive safely now," he said, and he was gone.
        —Pam Houston, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had"
Returning to Louis on the train, she would finger the twenties Shane gave her and not feel the slightest twinge of guilt.  Rather, she reasoned she was developing her own secrets, her own desires, her own darknesses, that she was no longer the obvious blond optimist, the girl with her heart on her sleeve, the girl who cheerily urged people to use words like upper instead of lower, the girl too stupid to know the thrill one can get from deception.    —Heidi Julavitas, "Marry the One Who Gets There First"

Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she'd watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas, or dandelion down, all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were canlendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies.  Hello!  Goodbye!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  What did Ruth care now?  Those girls were over and gone.  The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.
    —Lorrie Moore, "Real Estate"
At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much it reappeared.
    —Lorrie Moore, "Real Estate"

    "Terence!" Ruth clapped her hands twice, sharply.  "Speak more quickly!  I don't have long to live!"
    —Lorrie Moore, "Real Estate"

Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally.  One got it very, very specifically.
    —Lorrie Moore, "Real Estate"

The main thing in life was staying power.  That was it: stand around long enough, you'd get to sit down.
    —Annie Proulx, "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World"

He does not want to be uncivil, but this woman seems to take civility as encouragement.  On the plane from Seattle a warning light had gone off in his head when he discovered her ruddy full-moon face turned toward him in the next seat.  For a while he'd answered her pushy questions in monosyllables.  He'd tried to sleep, but when he awoke he found her face still turned toward him, as if she'd been watching him all the time.  "Why are you so attached to sleep?" she said, as if sleep were a character defect.  When he escaped to the toilet too many times, she asked if he had diarrhea or a bladder infection.  "Don't you ever smile?" she said.  "You're probably over fifty years old and there are no lines in your face.  It's as if your character never formed."  Early in the flight, in an unguarded moment, he'd told her that for the past three years he'd entered the events of every day into his computer.  "My God!" Greta had cried.  "If your computer crashes, how will you know who you are?"
    —James Spencer, "The Robbers of Karnataka"

Greta has a way of making Bannister feel personally responsible for all the misery, disease, and death in India.
    —James Spencer, "The Robbers of Karnataka"
"...Your daddy may have acted a little wacky, running off like he did and taking up with that girl, but to shoot your momma and then come in the grocery store and grin at you and hug you?  You really think anybody could do a thing like that?"
    What Dee Ann was beginning to think was that almost everybody could do a thing like that.  She didn't know why this was so, but she believed it had something to do with being an adult having ties.  Having ties meant you were bound to certain things — certain people, certain places, certain ways of living.  Breaking a tie was a violent act — even if all you did was walk out door number one and enter door number two — and one act of violence could lead to another.  You didn't have to spill blood to take a life.  But after taking a life, you still might spill blood, if spilling blood would get you something else you wanted.
    —Steve Yarbrough, "The Rest of Her Life"

His innocence startled her.  If she handled him right, Dee Ann realized, she could make him do almost anything she wanted.  For an instant she was tempted to put her hand inside his shirt, stroke his chest a couple of times, and tell him to climb out of the truck and stand on his head.  She wouldn't always have such leverage, but she had it now, and a voice in her head urged her to exploit it.
    —Steve Yarbrough, "The Rest of Her Life"

"God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life."
    — Neutral Milk Hotel

"In the cathedrals of New York and Rome there is a feeling that you should just go home, and spend a lifetime finding out just where that is.
    —Jump, Little Children, "Cathedrals"

When people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a
well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. — Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy. What had been between them, all these years, had been kept in balance because of their two marriages. Their marriages were the real content of their lives—her marriage to Lewis, the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life. This other thing depended on those marriages, for its sweetness, its consoling promise. It was not likely to be something that could hold up on its own, even if they were both free. Yet it was not nothing. The danger was in trying it, and seeing it all fall apart and then thinking it had been nothing.
    —Alice Munro, "Comfort"

Most people drink until they're twenty-five.  Some ride it out to thirty.  The rest of us turn pro.  I'm having a terrible year and the fans are against me.
    —Marc Nesbitt, "Gigantic"

"I thought you were right 'cause I knew I was wrong."
    —Remy Zero, "Smile", The Golden Hum

It is unfair that anyone should be devoted to me, although it can happen with pleasure, and ffeely.  I should mislead those in whom I quickened this feeling, because I am no one's ultimate end, and cannot satisfy them.  Am I not near death?  So the object of their attachment will die.  Therefore, just as I should be guilty if I caused a falsehood to be believed, however gently persuasive I had been and however pleasurably it had been believed, giving me pleasure too, in the same way I am guilty if I make myself loved and if I attract people to become devoted to me.  I have an abligation to warn those who would be willing to agree to the lie that they ought not to believe it, whatever advantage it may hold for me, because they must devote their lives and their efforts to pleasing God.
    —Pascal, Pensées (15)

We want truth and find only uncertainty in ourselves
    We search for happiness and find only wretchedness and death
    We are unable not to want truth and happiness, and are incapable of either certainty or happiness
    This desire has been left in us as much to punish us as to make us realize where we have fallen from
—Pascal, Pensées (20)

I blame equally those who decide to praise man, those who blame him, and those who want to be diverted  I can only approve those who search in anguish
—Pascal, Pensées (24)

Instinct, reason.  We have an inability to prove anything, which is impregnable to all dogmatism.
    We have an idea of truth impregnable to all Pyrrhonism
—Pascal, Pensées (25)

The stoics say: 'Go back into yourselves  There you will find peace'  And it is not true
    Others say: 'Go out, look for happiness in some distraction'  And that is not true  Illness is the result
    Happiness is neither outside us nor within us  It is in God, and both outside and within us
    —Pascal, Pensées (26)

Felix qui potuit [happy the man who could (know the reasons for things) (Virgil, Georgic, 2 490, quoted in Montaigne, The Essays, III 10)]
Felix nihil admirari [happy is he who is surprised at nothing (Horace, Epistles, I 6I)]
—Pascal, Pensées (27)




This interior war between reason and the passions meant that those who wanted peace divided into two sects  Some wanted to renounce the passions and become gods, the others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts  Des Barreaux  But neither group succeeded, and reason is still there accusing the baseness and injustice of the passions and disturbing the peace of those who give way to them, and the passions are still alive in those who want to reject them
—Pascal, Pensées (29)

A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she, too, was unable to abandon argument, which escalated into rage.  Neither one of them would back off; they held bitterly to principles.
    —Alice Munro, "Comfort"

There is something delightful about getting an idea on paper while it is still hot and charming, and seeing it in print before it begins to pale and stale.
    —H. L. Mencken, Chrestomathy

I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
    —H. L. Mencken, Chrestomathy

"You will not learn from me philosophy, but philosophizing, not thoughts merely for repetition but thinking."
    —Kant, quoted by Borowski, Leben

Sister Miriam did everything deliberately, as if under constant examination.
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

"Birds do what they do because God made them that way, and that's his business.  Only people can be cruel."
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

In the cloister, the habit eliminated distractions; out here, it created them.  Sister John considered the irony: the habit was originally adopted by nuns to make them inconspicuous in the world.  In the Middle Ages, a plain serge tunic, linen wimple, and veil was the outfit favored by poor widows.  A true habit now, Sister John thought as she glanced around the waiting room, would be a nylon jogging outfit worn over tennis shoes.
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

Everything in the room was designed for either measurement or analysis.
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

In a place where one was never allowed to forget the urgency, difficulty, and seriousness of one's mission, sneezes became pratfalls.
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

Sister John looked at the pots and ladles hanging over the stove, at the mixing bowls filled with dough and covered with recipe cards, and thought: I never saw my mother in a kitchen.
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

The response came in the form of understanding, and it came all at once, as if a dam had burst in her soul.  Her search for God had been like a hand trying to grasp itself.  God, who is infinite, cannot become present because He can never be absent.
    —Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

Now we are apart, trying to maintain our connection over this immense distance.  Trying to stay in touch  without toufh; which effort changes us deeply, perhaps even deforms us.
    —Andrea Barrett, "Servants of the Map"

It is odd, isn't it?  That all one's pleasures here are retrospective; in the moment itself, there is only the moment, and the pain.
    —Andrea Barrett, "Servants of the Map"

It is his mother, dead so many years, who seems to speak most truly to the new person he is becoming.  As if the years between her death and now were only a detour, his childhood self emerging from a long, uneasy sleep.  Beyond his work, beyond the mapping and recording, he is seeing; and this — it is terrifying — is becoming more important to than anything.
    —Andrea Barrett, "Servants of the Map"


He has grown morose, he knows.  Worse than morose.  Maudlin, self-pitying.  And self-deluding: not just about his possible talents, but in the very language with which he now contemplates writing to Clara.  Nobility, duty, sacrifice — whose words are those?  Not his.  He is using them to screen himself from the knowledge of whatever is shifting in him.
    —Andrea Barrett, "Servants of the Map"

This corner of North Wales feels a long way from the center of life, from London or Liverpool or, heavens, America.  And nationalism is a way of putting it back in the center, of saying that what's here is important enough.
    —Peter Ho Davies, "Think of England"

Clarence John Softitch, Pinky to his friends, at five foot eight and 482 pounds on a good day, is fat, not large, big, or big-bones.  Not hefty, husky, generous, or oversized.  Nor robust, portly, or pleasingly plump.  He is fat.  Enormous.  Corpulent.  And no delicate euphemisms or polite evasions can relieve him of this knowledge when every movement, whether tying a shoe or climbing a short flight of stairs, becomes a labor of the heart.
    —Claire Davis, "Labors of the Heart"

Morbidly obese, he's been categorized.  Morbidly.  As in deadly, not sadly, which is the way he's preferred to construe it.
    —Claire Davis, "Labors of the Heart"

He tells her his name, says, "Call me Pinky," and he wants to say, All my friends do, but thinks, What friends? And feels a surge of despair.  What folly.  What gall.  What enormous odds.  It's overwhelming, this business of love.
    —Claire Davis, "Labors of the Heart"

Rose arches an eyebrow at him.  "I don't know what you expect from me."  She crosses her arms, cups and elbow in each palm.  "But I'm tapped out when it comes to men.  Pity, love, anger, compassion — you name it, and I've exhausted it."
    "I'm sorry," Pinky says, and he means it.  He wonders what could have hurt her so deeply, briefly envies her pain, the experience of being close enough to wound or be wounded.  And then, of course, he realizes that's nonsense.  Believes he has the perfect vantage for sympathy, from behind this great bulwark of flesh.  He's thinking of himself now — the lifetime alone, avoiding pain.  He runs a hand down his chest, down the globe of his belly, a gesture he's developed over the years, familiarizing himself with the expanding boundaries of his body.  "We're neighbors," he says, and she seems puzzled, but there's something in his face, or his tone, that puts her at ease.
    —Claire Davis, "Labors of the Heart"

there's no help for it, but Pinky feels a melancholy he's hard put to explain, and it has to do with the onset of dark and the sudden still.  It has to do with the small woman at his side, her mistrust, and his own lifetime of hiding, in his house, his work, and foremost his own flesh.  And he sees it has to do with fear — the way we run through our lifes in terror of it — and everything to do with despair, and perhaps, he thinks, that is what despair is, finally, a lack of daring.
    —Claire Davis, "Labors of the Heart"

The formal greeting conveys an odd intimacy.  It is clear that we are breathing the same air now, that we have taken each other's measure.  Both girls look straight at me, no longer bridling.  All three of us know perfectly well that the man — my European husband — was just an excuse, a playing field for our curiosity.  The curiosity of sisters separated before birth and flung by the caprice of history half a world away from each other.  Now in this troublesome way our connection has been established, and between my guilt and my dawning affection I suspect that I'll never get rid of these two.  Already in my mind is forming an exasperating vision of the gifts I know I'll have to give them: lace underpants, Tampax music cassettes, body lotion — all of them extracted from me with the tender ruthlessness of family members anywhere.  And then what?  What, after all these years, will there be to say?  Well, the first thing to do is answer.  "Bonjour, mesdemoiselles," I reply, in my politest voice.
    —Andrea Lee, "Brothers and Sisters Around the World"

That was how it started: with two wrongs.  After a lifetime of wrongs, what were two more?
    —Roy Parvin, "Betty Hutton"

He liked her smile, how it closed the space between them, held nothing back, no room for anything but it.  It made him feel more than who he was.
    —Roy Parvin, "Betty Hutton"

Isn't that all she has — insulating silence, the silence of retreat?
    —Nancy Reisman, "Illumination"

When you lie in a swing all day, you live in the world you read about.  You drag a bare foot back and forth across the floor and hear the song the chains sing, but you aren't really you.
    —Annette Sanford, "Nobody Listens When I talk"

When you aren't really you, then the who that you are is different somehow: strong and part of everything…sure of a harvest for every season…glad to be sad.  You are a riddle with hundreds of answers, a song with a  thousand tunes.
    —Annette Sanford, "Nobody Listens When I Talk"

I began to jog, laughing at the spectacle I was making, a middle-aged woman running to catch a bus, as if in my rush to leave the town I had forgotten myself, just for a moment, and thought that I was still a young girl.
    —Katherine Shonk, "My Mother's Garden"

There is a sage old Basque saying that goes: As youth fades away, one grows older.
    —Trevanian, "The Apple Tree"

"The things I've seen men do to horses made me believe in sin, original and every other kind.  And when I die, and that isn't so far away now, I expect to be punished for the sins I looked upon but didn't stop.  But what I'm telling you is, that's the wages of a life at the track.  You don't say everything you know."
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

It was more than the money, it was what the theft meant—that you can't afford to be happy, because being happy made you do things that then ended in greater unhappiness than you had been feeling before you got happy.  Everyone knew that that's the way it was with love and sex and men—the happier you were when you fell in love, the more crushed you would be when it didn't work out—but what was even more depressing was that that was the way it was with simple things like pork stew and flowers.
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Their very relaxation in the presence of what excited everyone else set them apart and made them attractive.
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

One of the distinctions between owners as a class and, say, grooms as a class was that, whereas grooms sometimes knew what they wanted and took it, owners always knew what they deserved.  Assistant trainers, in Oliver's experience, were generally unsure on both counts.
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

The two-year-olds in training sales bothered her for obvious reasons—you had to wince at the sight of those babies flying around the track, their tender legs pounding the hard ground.  And the yearling sales bothered her for other obvious reasons—all those even younger babies, fat and shiny, bearing too much weight on their tender joints, overfed, overgrown.  You didn't even have to look at the X-rays of their knees to know they were already compromised.
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

"Darlin'," said Deirdre, "when you have jumped thirteen-hundred-pound Holsteiners over five-foot and six-foot triple combinations and then turned back to a five-foot narrow and then galloped as hard as you could to a twelve-foot water jump, a lawyer isn't much."
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

"…every trainer here has horses on his conscience, myself included."
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

"You can't take responsibility for every little feeling."
"You have to, though.  You can't but you have to, anyway.  You are not able, but you are obliged to."
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

"It's fine for him to be saved.  What about them?  That's what I never understood about my folks' church back home.  They always seemed to be extending the hand of welcome to the returning sinner, but the effects of his sins were still right there for everyone to see…  I finally just thought that the sinner was more interesting to everyone than the consequences of the sins, so what happened was, they all gathered around him, or her, for that matter, and to hell with the rest of it.  Somebody being saved was the easy part.  Cleaning up the mess was the hard part."
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

The abuse was like a heavy rain or a cascade of something.  Some people actually professed to like Buddy—he was earthy, honest, lively, sometimes funny, and always, always, always, what you saw was what you got.  Lots of people considered this a virtue.  It was supposed to elicit its complementary virtue—being able to take it.  While he was working at there, Oliver had accepted that this was part of the learning curve at the racetrack—being able to take it was a general quality that would stand him in good stead.  When he quit, he had felt some shame at not being able to take it.
    —Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

...it was in conflict that you saw into the other.  Without conflict, he felt he was seeing only a surface.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

The thing about Jesus was that he laid down the rules, but you had to figure out how to abide by them yourself.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

He hadn't won, thank Jesus for that, because one of the things he had to get used to was being a loser.  Jesus himself had said that, as hard as it was for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, it was even harder for a trainer with a 25-percent win ratio to get into heaven.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

When they stopped at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena to pick up the Kingstons, Andrea Melanie was quite bubbly about the car.  She said, "Don't you like it?  We just got it today.  We didn't have any sport-utility vehicles, can you believe it?  Sometimes you just overlook some things, and then you are so surprised when you realize it.  I thought maybe there was a Suburban or something like that at one of the houses, but I called around, and no!  I just laughed.  Anyway, we saw that there were a lot of sport-utility vehicles at the racetrack, and I said to Jason, Well, if we're going to do it, we have to look like we're going to do it, so we bought this right off the floor.  We hardly every buy any car right off the floor, but this one happened to be fully loaded, so why not?  You can always take it back later and have stuff added if you want."
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

By the end of the auctions, the Kingstons had spent ten million dollars on two-year-olds, and Buddy had to find stalls for six more horses.  He had to find room in his bank account for the $375,000, give or take a commission or two, that Sir Michael had sent his way.  He had to make room in his future for a return favor (Jesus probably knew what that would be already, some sort of test, which maybe was the long-term point of all this to begin with), and he had to make room in his already busy day for the endless stroking of Andrea Melanie Kingston, which he saw, now that he had the return on his investment, could turn into a significant penance.  That Jesus was a trickster, never more so than when he was keeping quiet and waiting for you to make up your own mind.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Unbeknownst to all humans, because no studies had been done in this area,
though one was planned at UC, Davis, Justa Bob could count to three.  That
is, he could recognize that there were more than two horses in front of him,
but fewer than many, which was defined by his brain as four or more.  Thus,
there were three.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

What could you do?  Sometimes, in spite of yourself and everything you knew about appearances’ being deceiving, even though you were ages old and had been in the horse business all your life and had seen every deceptive appearance fall away to reveal the plain and sometimes ugly reality within, even though you had a wife and kids who had kids of their own and you knew in your very bones that beauty was the most fleeting thing of all, appearances ravished you anyway, and gave you the strange sensation of a finger running up your spine and tickling the back of your neck until you thought that, if you weren’t in public every day, surrounded by cynical and hard-bitten men, you might tremble at it.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

washers, bolts, screws, ax handles, hammers, tool belts, circular-saw blades, nails, eyebolts, lock sets, sanders, slot-head screwdrivers, routers, ripsaws.  There was a lot to be said for the orderly and calm contemplation and then selection of objects that could not move of their own accord, that had no agendas of their own, that stayed where you put them.  In that world, being well organized would actually have a terminal effect—you would put something away, or hang it up, and come back an hour later, or a year later, and find it right there, essentially unchanged.  With a horse, you never found anything unchanged.  The best you could hope for was minimal change along a predictable path.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

“They aren’t like us.  They don’t have to know that they know, they just have to know it.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

“They do it all the time.  All the time they just let us buy on credit.  That’s how I know they like it.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like what they do.  What they do that we ask of them.”
    “Do they”  That’s what I really wake up wondering.  Am I flogging these poor beasts to their early destruction, sinner that I am?  They weren’t built to run so far, so fast.  They weren’t built to live in a barn, without touching one another.  They certainly weren’t built to jump over fences, be weaned at six months, be ridden, eat grain and hay, wear blankets.  Och!”
    “No, they weren’t built for that, but the building accommodates it, and the soul inside the building likes it.  Deirdre, they like to have something to think about.  They like to have problems to solve.  If we don’t give them some, they’ll find some.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

But at least he could soothe himself with the knowledge that he had learned something, and what he had learned was that, the smoother things went, the more careful you had to be.  When you were in the shit, you had only one choice, which was to get out of the shit.  When you were in clover, you had choices every minute…
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

She said, “I thought this was going to be a nice day.”
    “I did, too.”
    “Then why do you want to wreck it?”
    He almost said one thing, something about how he didn’t want to wreck it, but then he said, “Because a nice day would be fake for us.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

“I don’t know, Louisa.  I don’t know what love is anymore.  If I ever did.”  He saw that he had embarked upon honesty at last.  He sighed.
    “Don’t say that.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it makes me feel dizzy.”
    “Dizzy like you’re having an attack?”
    “I don’t know.  No.  Dizzy like I’ve lost track of everything.  Dick, we’ve been together for twenty-five years.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

The fact was, it was an owner who made you what you were as a trainer.  Without the owner’s greed, impetuousness, ignorance, and money, you, the trainer, had no need for experience, skepticism, or wisdom.  Without an owner you were just a guy.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

But, after all, plans were the worst.  They drained you of every bit of present life, until all you were was a containment building, and the ghost of yourself was lost on the baports of the future, waiting to exist.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

…to be frank there was a lot about patience that felt just like not caring much at all.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

He was a horse.  He had no expectations about what was normal.. His whole life was a demonstration that anything at all could happen at any time.  You could go anywhere, do anything, have anything be asked of you, from running and jumping in paradise at one end to starving in Texas at the other.  He sighed a large horse sigh, though.

In the end, of course, it was the uncertainty that hurt.  Had she been sure once and for all either way, up or down, she might not have been forced to act against Al as she did, but when he was up she had to put him down, and when he was down she had to make sure he knew it.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

It almost made him wish he had furry ears himself.  A horse’s ears, he had noticed over the years, were eminently strokable, if the horse liked it.  Your hands just fit around them, and they slipped through your palms like silk.  It was old horsemen’s wisdom that you never stood directly in front of a horse’s head, because that was where he couldn’t see you, and that head, should it shoot outward, was quite a powerful blunt object.  But he had always thought that, even though a horse couldn’t see you there, that was the place he could most strongly feel you, and if he trusted you, he would enjoy your presence there, your hands on his ears, your cheek against his forehead, which was where Joy’s now lay.  The horse’s head was nearly in her lap.  If a horse could not feel love as we know it, he thought, what was that he was witnessing?  Maybe the horse didn’t carry it away with him, and brood over it, and wonder about it, and reflect upon the changes it had made in his life, but look at that—he certainly felt it, came out to meet it, reached for it, relaxed into it, could not get enough of it.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

“That’s a grief to be cultivated, because you can come back to that one every time you need relief.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Like every genius, and he was a genius, as his race record would eventually prove, he had not so much a plan as a specific, overriding aim…His aim was to run.  And he was in luck.  Not only did he mean to run, he could run; perhaps, though, the cause and effect were reversed—he could run, and so he meant to run…Like all geniuses, he had no perspective, could get no perspective, did not even seem to understand that there was such a thing as perspective.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

You got up, threw on some clothers, ran out to the barn, and, whatever you were feeling, sleepy, anxious about money, achy, fearful, hard, they plucked you right out of that with their pricked ears and big eyes and open nostrils.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

“…there’re some people, you know, they always think about things in terms of deserving them or not, and the more you give them, the less they feel they can take, because they’ve used up what they deserve.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven


“What have I gotten from brining my passions to bear on everything, George?  Exhausted.  That’s what.”
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Marvelous Martha pondered that word, “consult.”  If the horse had a chip in her knew, that was a pretty cut-and0pdried matter, upon which little consultation was needed.  Besides that, the authority Marvelous Martha most often consulted was her own intuition.  Limiting her consultations in the way resulted in a much more productive use of time and much less interpersonal conflict.  And in addition to that, she had noticed over the years that everyone more or less agreed about a fair accompli.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Andrea Melanie’s deepest conviction was that once your looks were gone there were to be no more boyfriends, and so you had better consolidate your assets early and hold on to them.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Of course marriage, she had apologized for her more colorful characterizations of him, but, then, she hadn’t taken them back, she had just shifted her relationship to them.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

…she no longer believed it was possible to tell anyone anything, especially something that they needed to know.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

He knew enough to woo her with desire rather than money, looks, intelligence, accomplishments, or promises of good times.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

One thing you needed if you were a crook, Buddy had always thought, was a well-developed sense of right and wrong.  Without that, you couldn’t keep track of your sins and keep them to yourself.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

Watching Curtis Doheny was like watching someone get something on someone else, spill coffee or something slick.  It just made you uncomfortable, even though it wasn’t your business.
—Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven

LA had no center of gravity, where you stood and knew that you were at the heart of the ciy.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

A sort of eternal present is suggested by the cars Angelenos drive—they seem forgotten by time.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

The colossal, clogged freeways hold LA together but are great murderers of spontaneity.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

I pointed out that southern Californians disliked confrontation—they liked to think that everything was fine…It was part of living in an eternal present that ignored yesterday’s earthquakie and tomorrow’s drought.  This was epitomized in the common sight I would show Talal the next day: the big houses built on shelves and stilts hanging off the steep hillsides of Malibu, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades.  The very sight of them was like an editorial cartoon of the mind of LA, but they were real.  Honking a horn would remind everyone within earshot that something was wrong somewhere.  The noise would bruise the air.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

There is always the snappish reminder that something out here is phony—the very sunshine is scolded for not being quite real.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

Shortly after moving here I had visited Holy Cross Cemetery and Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City.  These are known for their lavish treatment of the dead, especially their celebrity dead.  Holy Cross is officially one of the Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.  It subdivisions suggest a Catholic theme park: Mother of Mercy, Mother of Good Hope, Precious Blood, Mother of Sorrows, Holy Redeemer, Divine Savious, Assumption, Holy Rosary, Good Shepherd, and more.  The theme-park feeling is so strong that when you see a reference to the Ascensions you wonder if it might be a ride.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

Even in bigger-than-life stained glass, the scene is so impossibly famous that it leaves an impression close to zero.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

Like the Last Supper window, David is so colossally famous that there is nothing for your eye to discover; there is nothing new.
    —Peter Theroux, Translating LA

“You talk first, then I’ll decide what I want to say to you.”
    —Tom Berdine, “Spring Rite”

“We all look for resolutions,” Lamar said.  “Something neat, a means of satisfactions, or even redemption.  But that instinct runs counter to the rule of entropy, the natural reign of chaos.  We try to impose order, discipline, a sense of fitness, because it suits our vanity to think we are the measure of destiny, that man is made in the image of God,m with mastery over the brute forms of the earth and over our own narrative, as if history weren’t messy, accidental, and arbitrary.  You can’t blame yourself for failing in a responsibility when there’s no reckoning.”
    —David Edgerley Gates, “Compass Rose”

He headed up toward Main toward the town square, wondering what it was those women seemed to know so effortlessly that completely escaped him…
    —Dennis Lehane, “Running Out of Dog”

What Elgin couldn’t abide was that there was something in Perkin that protected him from consequence.  Something that made him look down on people who paid for their sins, who fell without a safety net to catch them.
    —Dennis Lehane, “Running Out of Dog”

They always mention their husbands pretty early in the conversation.  It’s like flipping open a wallet to show an I.D.  They all travel on their husbands’ passports, these thirty-five-year-old women.
—Martha Moffett, “Dead Rock Singer”

One part of him thought that life was too short.  The other part thought that it was long enough.
—Martha Moffett, “Dead Rock Singer”


Death knows  who is here, though
You avoid display, stay home, and think clear thoughts.
    —John Updike, “Transparent Stratagems”

Here there are two tall windows, very tall, many-paned, and the gauzy white curtains swirl in the breeze, life and fall like a breath, like a sigh.
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

These men are also dying in the trenches—can it be right to think that les of a tragedy?  The cowards, the liars, the bullies, and worse.  They are also fighting for their country.
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

Home for us was not exactly something to hold on to, it was something to figure out, to understand.
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

“Strange, isn’t it,” she said, “the things that mattered then.”
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

“I don’t know how I can go home anyway,” Elizabeth said.  “Do you?  How can we do it, how can we go back to our own table, out own beds, as if we were the same people?”  “I feel broken,” Elizabeth said, in the flickering candlelight in the cellar of the Hotel Terminus.”  “Something is broken in me.  It’s all just a horrible mess, and there’s no meaning in any of it.”
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

Oh, sometimes this war seems like a terrible machine, carried along by its own momentum.  Chewing up lives and spitting them out.  We do our work day by day and try not to think about the enormity of it.  The destruction, the horror, the waste.  And it seems like it will go on and on, until there are no young men left in the world.
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

“But things have their own logic, things operate by their own rules, and it makes some kind of sense, at the front, though it would make none at all in the real world.”
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

It was one of the things we liked about Hugh, the way he didn’t ever play that tedious game of trying to tell us apart.  Most people did, and had done allour lives.  As if together we were too much for them, as if the only way they could deal with us was to divide, to diminish us.
    —Mary Swan, “The Deep”

I’m not entirely sure of the person he is writing to, the future person he was imagining.  I don’t know whether that person is alive or not.  There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us.  How many versions do we abandon over the years?  How many end up nearly forgotten, mumbling and gasping for air in some tenement room of our consciousness, like elderly relatives suffering some fatal lung disease?
    —Dan Choan, “Big Me”

Everyone was wrong.  She was not timid or acquiescent or natural or pure.  When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all that was left.
    —Alice Munro, “Floating Bridge”

“…his father had sighed deeply and with tired eyes looked at him in the rearview mirror.  “You know,” he said, “I’m at the winter of my life.”  “You’re fifty-one,” his son had said, “what do you mean?”  “I mean,” he’d said, “I’m on my way out.”  For twenty years now, he’d been in this state of surrender and yet kept on living.  The cancer authors wouldn’t know what to make of the success of his defeatism.
    —Fred G. Leebron, “That Winter”

“What you call your personality, you know?—it’s not the actual nones, or teeth, something solid.  It’s more like a flame.  A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there’s no sign of it, like it had never been.
    —Joyce Carol Oates, “The Girl with the Blackened Eye”

I was contemptuous of “facts” for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
    —Joyce Carol Oates, “The Girl with the Blackened Eye”

Was there anything more representative of illness and confinement than daytime TC, anything more definitively the killing of time?
    —Antonya Nelson, “Female Trouble”

It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother.  Somehow, it seems a form of betrayal.  So few do.  To join in the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our mothers’ indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of their pain, their tendency to drink or teetotal, their warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusion or embarrassing clarity.  It isn’t enough that our mothers sweated, labored, bore their daughters nobly or under total anesthesia or both.  No.  They must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses for the rest of their lives.  It is all right to forgive out fathers.  We all know that.  But our mothers are held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles.  They simply must be to blame.
    —Louise Erdrich, “Revival Road”

I return to the cave.
“How are things?” Janet says.
I grimace.
“Well, shit,” Janet says.  “You know I’m freaking rooting for you guys.”
Sometimes she can be pretty nice.
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

“Sad,” he said.  “Sad is all it is.  We live in a beautiful world, full of beautiful challenges and flowers and birds and super people, but also a few regrettable bad apples, such as that questionable Janet.  Do I hate her?  Do I want her killed?  Gosh no, I think she’s super, I want her to be praised while getting a hot oil massage, she has some very nice traits.  But guess what, I’m not apying her to have nice traits, I’m paying her to do consistently good work.  Is she?  Doing consistently good work?  She is not.  And here you are, saddled with a subpar colleague.  Poor you.  She’s stopping your rise and growth.  People are talking about you in our lounge.  Look, I know you feel Janet’s not so great.  She’s a lump to you.  I see it in your eye.  And that must chafe.  Because you are good.  Very good.  One of our best.  And she’s bad, very bad, one of our worst, sometimes I could just slap her for what she’s doing to you.”
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

“You know what it’s like, to me?” he says.  “The Bible.  Remember that part in the Bible when Christ or God says that any group or organization of two or more of us is a body?  I think that is so true.  Our body has a rotten toe by the name of Janet, who is turning black and stinking up the joint, and next to that bad stinking toe lives her friend the good non-stinker toe, who for some reason insists on holding its tongue, if a toe can be said to have a tongue.  Speak up, little toe, let the brain know the state of the rot, so we can rush down what is necessary to stop Janet from stinking.  What will be needed?  We do not yet know.  Maybe some antiseptic, maybe a nice sharp saw with which to lop off Janet.”
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

“Why do you have to keep bringing that old shit up?  Doe was so right.  For you to win, I have to lose.  Like when I was a kid and in front of the whole neighborhood you called me an animal torturer?  That really hurt.  That caused a lot of my problems.  We were working on that in group right before I left.”
    “You were torturing a cat,” she says.  “With a freaking prod.”
    “A prod I built myself in metal shop,” he says.  “But of course you never mention that.”
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

Other than that all is well, please don’t worry.  Well worry a little. We are at the end of our rope or however you say it, I’m already deep into the overdraft account and it’s only the 5th.  Plus I’m so tired at night I can’t get to the bills and the last time I paid late fees on both Visas and the MasterCard, thirty bucks a pop, those bastards, am thinking about just sawing off my arm and mailing it in.  Ha ha, not really, I need that arm to sign checks.
    Love, Me
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

“God, you just love the little shits no matter what, don’t you?” she says.  “You know what I’m saying?  If Bradley’s dad woulda stuck around it might’ve been better.  Bradley never knew him.  I always used to say he took one look at Bradley and ran off.  Maybe I shouldn’t of said that.  At least not in front of Bradley.”
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

A memo, to Distribution:
    Regarding the rumors you may have lately been hearing, it says.  Please be advised that they are false.  They are so false that we considered not even bothering to deny them.  Because denying them would imply that we have actually heard them.  Which we haven’t.  We don’t waste our time on such nonsense.  And yet if we know that if we don’t deny the rumors we haven’t heard, you will assume they are true.  And they are so false!  So let us just categorically state that all the rumors you’ve been hearing are false.  Not only the rumors you’ve heard, but also those you haven’t heard, and even those that haven’t yet been spread, are false.  However, there is one exception to this, and that is if the rumor is good.  That is, if the rumor presents us, us up here, in a positive light, and our mission, and our accomplishments, in that case, and in that case only, we will have to admit that the rumor you‘ve been hearing is right on target, and congratulate you on your fantastic powers of snooping, to have found out that secret super thing!
    Because what is truth?  Truth is that thing which makes what we want to happen happen.  Truth is that thing which, when told makes those on our team look good, and inspires them to greater efforts, and causes people not on our team to see things our way and feel sort of jealous.  Truth is that thing which empowers us to do even better than we are already doing, which by the way is fine, we are doing fine, truth is the wind in our sails that blows only for us.  So when a rumor makes you doubt us, us up here, it is therefore not true, since we have already defined truth as that thing which helps us win.  Therefore, if you want to know what is true, simply ask what is best.  Best for us, all of us…
    —George Saunders, “Pastoralia”

    “You should be afraid to meet your Maker,” one angry woman wrote to him, soon after the Pill was approved.  “My dear madam,” Rock wrote back, “In my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always.  When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions.”
    —Malcolm Gladwell, “John Rock’s Error”

“Heaven and Hell, Rome, all the Church stuff—that’s for the solace of the multitude,” Rock said.  He had only a year to live.  “I was an ardent practicing Catholic for a long time, and I really believed it all then, you see.”
    —Malcolm Gladwell, “John Rock’s Error”

“It’s so awful you might as well be cheerful.”
    —Dr. Paul Farmer, from Tracy Kidder, “The Good Doctor”

“Living in Haiti, I realized that a minor error in one setting of power and privilege could have an enormous impact on the poor in another.  For me, it was a process, not an event.  A slow awakening, as opposed to an epiphany.
    —Dr. Paul Farmer, from Tracy Kidder, “The Good Doctor”



If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entrails.  I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument.  Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life.  In a certain sense, he did right.  That truth was not worth the stake.  Whether the earth or the sun resolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference.  To tell the truth, it is a futile question.  On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing.  It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life?  A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.  But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.  His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.  This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them.  A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show; you wonder why he is alive.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it.  On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to aboid pathos.  Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one “knew.”  This is because in reality there is no experience of death.  Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious.  Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths.  It is a substitute, and illusion, and it never quite convinces us.  That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive.  The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event.  If time frightens us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterward.  All the pretty speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least for a time.  From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has disappeared.  This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the absurd feeling.  Under the fatal lighting of that destiny its uselessness becomes evident.  No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
    —Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Pat Conroy has said that the South runs on denial.  I think this is true. We learn denial in the cradle and carry it to the grave.  It is absolutely essential to being a lady, for instance.  I myself was sent from the mountains of southwest Virginia, where I was growing up, down to Birmingham every summer to stay with my Aunt Gay Gay, whose task was to turn me into a lady.  Gay Gay'stwo specialties were Rising to the Occasion and Rising Above It All, whatever "it" happened to be.  Gay Gay believed that if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all.  If you don't discuss something, it doesn't exist.  She'd start in on them early, winking at my Uncle Bob and saying, "Pour me one, honey, it's already dark underneath the house."
—Lee Smith, "Driving Miss Daisy Crazy; Or, Losing the Mind of the South"

This is the life he designed, and it has failed him slowly.  He has searched this whole time for an acceptable version of himself.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

The poodle lady must have lived as a young woman with the torture of that terrible mole, and all of her fantasies about Elvis falling in love with a stout, ugly girl from the country were sometimes all that kept her going.  She had been young once and she was crying about this more than anything, it was clear.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

This was the kind of experience I wanted, something thrilling and dangerous that would mark me forever without altogether changing my life.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

He loved the heat, the ache of everything.  He loved sleeping in the car.  He loved the way train tracks crossed his path, and he loved watching the boxcars bang past, some with open doors.  He loved the possibility of it, a ride in a direction you weren't even sure of.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

Every grown man, she thought, should count among his experiences at least one public appearance in drag.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

The birthday boy had taken the chicken's disappearance in stride.  He was the kind of rich kid who knew from an early age that most everything could be replaced.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

The only images for sale in the gift shop are of Elvis while he was still young and newly rescued from poverty, still surprised to have his picture taken and to be dressed in such fine, tailored suits.  What sells is the memory of someone young and promising, someone whose troubles haven't found him yet, someone who can't see the future for what it is.
—Christine Hodgen, "The Hero of Loneliness"

Bailey has a chubby little stomach, but because she wears a navel ring and cropped-off sweaters, it took me forever to make this simple observation.  That's something I've noticed here on Level 2.  If a girls markets herself as cute, if by wearing a navel ring, for instance, she telegraphs her own belief in the attractiveness of her stomach, there will be a lag time before reality hits the eye of the beholder.  If it ever does.
—Elizabeth Tippens, "Make a Wish"

Just to get their German-Awiss-Austrian-whatever across to the one last mall customer who might have missed it, Alpenhaus was hired a dwarf to parade back and forth outside its entrance wearing an Alpenhaus sandwich board, lederhosen, and a little green Alpine hiking hat.  With a feather.  And I have to pass by this reeking medieval indignity in order to get my Danish and coffee.  But this is how badly I want my Danish and coffee.  It is my one and only pleasure of the day, and while I actually do care that it is sickening and unhealthy and causes an intense sugar/caffeine rush/crash, and that I have to witness human debasement in order to get it, I feel physically incapable of ordering anything else.
—Elizabeth Tippens, "Make a Wish"

My lunch, and therefore my entire day, is in danger of being ruined by a man in a big white cowboy hat.  That is, if I'm seeing things right.  I mean, I know I am, but you have to question a hat like that.  You just have to.
—Elizabeth Tippens, "Make a Wish"

Again my father looked to the side.  I marveled that this man could be so indelicate.  Didn't he know this was an unpleasant conversation?  I looked around the house.  He was somewhat poor.  I forgave him his bad manners.
—Linda Mendling, "Inappropriate Babies"

Then the nice lady came out of the bathroom and got in her husband's Ford, and they drove close by us, slowly staring, like Americans on a safari.
—Jane R. Shippen, "I am Not Like Nuñez"

Each day, each instance of the message, filled me with contempt for this need she had to put herself forward, to flaunt her Christianity in that manner.  Each moment when she shifted forward in her seat to commence her little sermon, I glared at her with narrow eyes as if I could silence her with the completeness of my disapproval.
    I am an educated man, a cultivated man.  I am not the type of person who would ever speak aloud on a train, unless there were some purpose to it, as saying to the person next to me, "Excuse me, you are standing on my foot" or "Please take your elbow out of my lungs."  I am the type of person who believes other people should obey the same rules I do, among them, namely, that no one should presume to deliver Golgothan messages on a commuter train when people are tired and simply want to get home as peaceably as possible.  It seemed clear to me that this message could not come from Jesus because He would be too polite to send it.  So I listened to her words every day, during a period of peak ridership, in transit from Georgia State to King Memorial or vice versa; and I disliked her every day as well, increasingly.
—Jim Grimsley, "Jesus is Sending You This Message"

Rachel, on the other hand, was still in graduate school.  A petite, elfish sprite of a girl with enormous clear green eyes and a tangle of ginger-colored hair usually bundled into a roll at the back of her head, she eschewed Parker's real world for the world of the mind, of student loans and poor health insurance, of identity politics and bad haircuts and perpetual unemployment.  Although nearly a year had passed since she had filed her dissertation...she was still trying desperately to locate that most elusive treasure in all of modern academia, a job.
—Marshall Boswell, "In Between Things"

They were just two lonely people trying to sustain an intimate breakup.  And
sustain it indefinitely.
—Marshall Boswell, "In Between Things"

"Marketing?  Isn't that where they create all these false expectations and phony desires to make people want things they don't really need?  Or am I getting that confused with pornography?"
—Marshall Boswell, "In Between Things"

Nothing could make her pretty, he thought.  But a person could like her very
much.
—Carrie Brown, "Father Judge Run"

He guessed that she was not dowdy but rather beyond the reach of fashion, like a ship's figurehead.
—Edith Pearlman, "Skin Deep"

She was not a woman novels were written for or about.
—Edith Pearlman, "Skin Deep"

The prince doesn't always find his way to the sleeping beauty.  Robert's daughter knew that, and she guessed that the sleeping beauty sometimes likes it that way.  But suppose that Livia had been seated at Twenty-two — or that Robert, stirred, had sought her out at Three.  Suppose he had discovered in her an impartial kindness uncomplicated by introspection, a kindness that made sympathy and even empathy seem like performance pieces.  Suppose he paid court; suppose he invented business to take him north, his visits surprising but not pertrubing her.
    One day, venturing to touch her face, he would watch the imprint of his own forefinger fade, slowly, as if to mock his unsated longing.
—Edith Pearlman, "Skin Deep"

Next came three dogs, their tails between their legs.  Edna recognized the bluetick markings, but the dogs seemed smaller, somehow, than their dogs. They bred them down, these days.  Coy had explained it to her.  They mixed in bird dog so they could hunt better in brush.  He didn't like it.  Little dogs for chasing little coons through little woods.  Not a thing to be proud of, but it was all you could do anymore since the world had gotten so small and so filled up with children and pups and saplings that there was hardly anyplace for something full-grown.
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

Edna had never heard the like.  This boy was some sort of Yankee, or maybe he was just from Charlotte, but either way he was one of those people that comes at you talking and leaves you talking and never shuts up enough to let the world catch its breath.
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

"Have you gone completely crazy, or are you only halfway there?"
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"


"Now," he said, and his head cocked like he heard something.  "Them's my
dogs."
    She listened to the breeze high in the leaves and to the water hissing across rocks in the creek.  If there had been some hounds sounding it would have been like the old days‹back when she and Coy thought that the woods would go on forever and that they would go on forever, too, back when a whole forest of tall trees held the stars higher in the sky.
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

She did not look at him.  She didn't need to.  He was familiar to her in every wrinkle and pain.  He was hers to have and to hold, but it was as if her hand had closed on sand, and the harder she squeezed, the quicker it ran
between her fingers.
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

Just when she thought she knew the exact shape of the old fool's foolishness, here it had gone and taken on a new shape, and now she was going to have to figure him out all over again.
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

No, she did not hear old hounds running through the woods of a deaf man's
memory.  She did not hear their mournful cries when they struck trail, did not hear how their music got sadder and more desperate the closer they got to what they wanted.  What was it, she had always wondered, what was it that drove them to chase after things that made them seem so unhappy?
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

Coy was leaning his head out the window, listening.  He was out there somewhere, spinning on ahead of her.  She wanted to cry his name, wanted to
say, "Coy, what's happening to you?  Where to you?  Where is the man I sued
to know?"  She wanted to bring him back to her, wanted to have him and to
hold him, but getting what you wanted‹holding it in your hand or in your heart‹getting what you wanted only meant that it was going to be gone from
your life forever.
—Stephen Coyne, "Hunting Country"

I drove my new used Pontiac with all the windows down and a Chesterfield
cigarette between my lips.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was an
alarm going off.  It was like the uneasy feeling after a nightmare that you
can't remember.  The worry had no picture, so it was more like a suspicion than fear.  At the same time I was happy to be driving toward someone else's troubles.  The sensation of delight on top of anxiety made me smile.  It was
a grin that represented a whole lifetime of laughing at pain.
—Walter Mosley, Bad Boy Brawly Brown

Sam Houston always made me angry.  It was the way he took everything he heard, saw, or read and made it seem that he was the expert.  If you came up to him and said that you put up a new cinderblock wall, he’d start lecturing you on the way to build a foundation and the type of drainoff that you’d need.  He hadn’t lifted a finger, but now he’s going to tell you what it was you did wrong.
—Walter Mosley, Bad Boy Brawly Brown

Sam had his point of view and I was sure that he had told me the truth as far as he saw it; but truth, as my uncle Roger used to say, is just one man’s explanation for what he thinks he understands.
—Walter Mosley, Bad Boy Brawly Brown

He was nowhere near handsome, but some girl would fall in love with his eyes.  He was absolutely sure of, and in love with, his own ideas.
—Walter Mosley, Bad Boy Brawly Brown

He had that jerky grin on his face, the one that made you want to like him even when you knew that, deep down, you had grave reservations.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

After I had slipped up in this manner a number of times, I decided that I needed some other mark, some way of distinguishing truly important highlighted passages from the ones that were slightly less important or not important at all.  Over the course of two hundred pages I had improvised a Byzantine system involving highlighter, underlines, and marginal punctuation marks.  What a truly major passage looked like is hard to re-create, though I can report that the people who sat down next to me in seminar often felt the need to comment on my thoroughness.
    In the end, my reading process had been warped into a strange kind of inventory taking, in which I was forced to divide the book into miniscule units, weighing the present sentence against all sentences that had come before, trying to find a place for it in my mysterious and ever-shifting hierarchy of classification.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

I hated it when she cried, hated how guilty it made me feel, and how manipulative she seemed in her misery.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

He looked at me.  I looked at her, then back at him, feeling instantly diminished by his presence—shorter, younger, more badly dressed than I’d been a second ago.  He made me think of all the books I hadn’t read, and all the ones I’d read but hadn’t fully understood.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

I’d met a lot of guys like him back home, factory workers and manual laborers who seemed too smart for the jobs they’d ended up with and only knew how to fight back with muttered curses and bitter jokes, guys who played the lottery every week just to remind themselves that you couldn’t win.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

What I wanted to forget—for her sake as well as mine—was the feeling of wild emptiness that had come upon me the moment I entered her, the awful physical knowledge that she’d been right all along: this really was all I’d wanted, and now that I had it, I knew I’d never want it again.  Her passion was embarrassing, not because of what it said about her, but because of what it revealed about me, the person who’d been willing to humor her and string her along for half a year just so I could fuck her and not feel a thing, except maybe that I deserved it for putting up with all those visits to the car lots, all the annoying chitchat, all those letters on pink stationery.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

Even if their faces had been totally blank, though, I’m pretty sure I would’ve known what they’d been up to.  Three years of college had brought me into frequent contact with couples who had just engaged in some form of sexual activity—not to mention highly infrequent but generally quite memorable contact with couples actually in the process of engaging in some form of sexual activity—and I’d gotten so I could recognize them at a glance.  It wasn’t that they all looked the same—some were mussed and seemingly drugged, some were fresh from the shower, some were furtive, others smug—but what they shared was an aura of privacy and collusion that sealed them off from the rest of the world, marking them as temporary foreigners in our midst, people you’d need to address in an unnaturally loud voice if you wanted them to understand what you were saying, or even that they were being spoken to in the first place.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

Though taking for everyone, those encounters were most stressful for the person whose parents had come to visit.  How could it have been otherwise?  There was something so nakedly revealing about being seen in the presence of the people who had made and raised you.  It was the Return of the Repressed, the pasts we had tried to conceal upon arrival at college suddenly taking human form and walking through the door with care packages in their arms and faces a lot like our own.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

“They don’t think I’m normal,” he reported one night, sounding somewhat offended by this verdict.
    “Do you?” I asked.
    “I reject the category,” he replied haughtily.  “Especially when it’s invoked by people who had electric buttwarmers installed in their cars.”
    “Buttwarmers?”
    “The seats heat up,” he explained.  “There’s some kind of coil hidden under the leather.”
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

With exasperation and a certain degree of scorn, Max had once described to me some of her elaborate beauty regimens—the manicures and pedicures, the leg and lip and bikini waxes, the clay masks and diet pills, the massages and hundred-dollar haircuts, the long hours she spent scouring fashion magazines, her brow knitted as though she were working her way through Hegel in the original—but I couldn’t help feeling then that all her hard work had paid off.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

    “Did you intend it as some kind of statement?”  He pronounced this last word with genuine distaste, as if we all knew about statements.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

She was the kind of woman you could imagine walking through the streets of revolutionary Iran in her usual attire and not upsetting the ayatollahs.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

Polly like to complain about how her father was never home, but it was Mr. Wells who finally answered on the seventh ring, barking out the word “Hello,” in such a way as to make it unmistakably clear what an enormous inconvenience and potential waste of time it was for him simply to have picked up the phone.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

He watched me the way you watch an employee or your own child, someone you have a right to stare at as long and hard as you please”.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

You got the feeling that the clock had just run out a few seconds ago on the Boy Wonder phase of his life”.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

    “Over-reacting?  You mean to the fact that a person I thought was my friend came to my house and took advantage of my family’s hospitality to steal something I’d put my heart and soul into, and then tried to pass it off as his own?  Over-reacting to the fact that you could have gotten me kicked out of school?  Is that what I’m over-reacting to?”
    “Huh.”  He looked troubled.  “When you put it that way…”
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

She just had that thing that some people have, that mysterious quality that makes you not want them to leave the room or turn their attention to someone else.
    —Tom Perrotta, Joe College

The sober-minded are always temperate in their consumption of skeptical
arguments, as they are of all commodities that delight the palate of
connoisseurs but are intoxicating and debilitating if enjoyed in excess.
—Allen W. Wood, "Philosophy: Enlightenment Apology, Enlightenment Critique"

Good sense is the best apportioned thing in the world: for each thinks he has
been so well provised with it that even those who are hard to content in all
other things are not accustomed to desire more of it than they have.
—Descartes, Discourse on Method

Somehow this bit of moving, unwelcome life had won him to itself forever.  It was so ugly and so lost.
    —William Carlos William, “White Mule”

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot-strap route has two choices.  Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel up climb.  The nurse had chosen the forgetting way.  Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul.  She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise.
    —Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

We are tired of being beautiful.  Lucy hides the lemon shoes and the red shoes and the shoes that used to be white but are now pale blue under a powerful bushel basket on the back porch, until one Tuesday her mother, who is very clean, throws them away.  But no one complains.
    —Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

Hake stands up then.  He wants to hug Big Boy but he can’t bring himself to do it.  They’ve long sine got beyond all that.
    “Y’all better get on the road, then, I guess,” says Hake.
    —Jesse Hill Ford, “Big Boy”

He was an odd guy, my grandfather, and I am told I take after him.  It was he who caused the trouble.  On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight.  I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction.  Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.  I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”  They thought the old man had gone out of his mind.  He had been the meekest of men.  The younger children were rushed from the room, the shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it sputtered on the wick like the old man’s breathing.  “Learn it to the younguns,” he whispered fiercely; then he died…
    —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I spoke automatically and with such fervor that I did not realize that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me.  I coughed, wanting to stop and go to one of the tall brass, sand-filled spittoons to relieve myself, but a few of the men, especially the superintendent, were listening and I was afraid.  So I gulped it down, blood, saliva and all, and continued.  (What powers of endurance I had during those days!  What enthusiasm!  What a belief in the rightne890-ss of things!)  I closed my ears and swallowed blood until I was nauseated.  The speech seemed a hundred times as long as before, but I could not leave out a single word.  All had to be said, each memorized nuance considered, rendered.  Nor was that all.  Whenever I uttered a word of three or more syllables a group of voices would yell for me to repeat it.
    —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

    “Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand.  We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to know your place at all times.  All right, now, go on with your speech.”
    —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Now I close my eyes and travel to a good place, a place where life is worth living.  No crime, no rapes, no sound of gunshots, and no discrimination.  A place so far away from here that it is hard to imagine.
    —Max Moran, “No Way Out”

This is my senior year in high school and I’m feeling the pressure.  I got two choices: a dead-end job or college.  I can’t picture myself in school in the future, but I don’t want to keep on making $5 and I’m too proud to beg for quarters.  I’m an intelligent young Hispanic male who will never commit a crime because my mind is too precious to be trapped in a dark cell.
    —Max Moran, “No Way Out”

Entitlement, I have told them, is a matter of feeling like we rather than they.  You think you have a right to things, a place in the world, and it is so intrinsically a part of you that you cannot imagine people like me, people who seem to live in your world, who don’t have it.
    —Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”

The fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it.  I have learned with great difficulty that the vast majority of people believe that poverty is a voluntary condition…
    —Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”

I was only thirteen.  I wanted us to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over.  I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been.  That desire is one I have seen in other members of my family.  It is the first thing I think of when trouble comes—the geographic solution.  Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over.  What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.
    —Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”

In that new country, we were unknown.  The myth of the poor settled over us and glamorized us.  I saw it in the eyes of my teachers, the Lion’s Club representative who paid for my new glasses, and the lady from the Junior League who told me about the scholarship I had won.  Better, far better, to be one of the mythical poor than to be part of the they I had known before.  I also experienced a new level of fear, a fear of losing what had never before been imaginable.  Don’t let me lose this chance, I prayed, and lived in terror that I might suddenly be seen again as what I knew myself to be.

    —Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”
For me, the bottom line has simply become the need to resist that omnipresent fear, that urge to hide and disappear, to disguise my life, my desires, and the truth about how little any of us understand—even as we try to make the world a more just and human place.  Most of all, I have tried to understand the politics of they, why human beings fear and stigmatize the different while secretly dreading that they might be one of the different themselves.  Class, race, sexuality, gender—and all the other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other—need to be excavated from the inside.
    —Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”

John heard from his parents stories of experiences which they themselves had long since “forgotten”: accounts of terror, humiliation and repudiation which had formerly been handed down from parent to child as an inheritance, to be told and later relived.  John was particularly moved by his mother’s insistence that his generation was the first to be spared the worst of it—the constant possibility of lynching, the near-total lack of hope, the daily scorn that permitted no reply, no leeway.  To be free of that, to be safe from night riders, to have steady work, to be left mostly alone, all that seemed enough.  “They wanted me to be glad I could walk on the sidewalk,” John summarized their conversations, “because they used to have to move into the gutter in their town when a white man approached them.  But I told them that once you walk on the sidewalk, you look in the windows of the stores and restaurants, and you want to go there, too.  They said, maybe my children, and I said me, so that my children will be the first really free Negroes.
    —Robert Coles, Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear

“…You see, we just grow up to take it.  But not you, you don’t have to, and that’s the difference.”
    —Robert Coles, Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear

My father stood up then, and his face looked wide, though it looked you, still.  He looked like a young man who had been scolded and wasn’t sure how he should act.  “You get out of here,” he said in a loud voice.  “My God.  What a thing to say.  I don’t even know you.”
    —Richard Ford, “The Optimists”

On Saturdays at Mrs. Umemoto’s sewing school,
when I took my place beside the other girls,
bent my head and went to work,
my foot keeping time on the pedal,
it was to learn the charitable oblivion
of hand and mind as one—
a refuge such music affords the maker—
the pleasure of notes in perfectly measured time.
    —Cathy Song, “The Grammar of Silk”

Being employed at St. Regis
was how we handed ourselves over to the world.
    —Luis J. Rodriguez, “Night Shift at St. Regis”

The rose of the world was breathing out smell.  It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.  It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.  Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness.
    —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Nanny’s words made Janie’s kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain.
    —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Her voice began snagging on the prongs of her feelings.
    —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“…Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me.”
    —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

By the end of October the rain had come, falling heavily upon the six-inch layer of dust which had had its own way for more than two months.  At first the rain had merely splotched the dust, which seemed to be rejoicing in its own resiliency and laughing at the heavy drops thudding against it; but eventually the dust was forced to surrender to the mastery of the rain and it churned into a fine red mud that oozed between our toes and slopped against our ankles as we marched miserably to and from school.
    —Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Though I cherished both sides of my heritage I often felt that I didn’t completely belong in either world.  I would find, in the non-Indian world, that respect for elders was not present: people talked too much, laughed too loud, asked too many questions, had no respect for privacy, were overly competitive, and put a higher value on material wealth.  Navajos, on the other hand, place much more emphasis on a person’s relations to family, clan, tribe, and other inhabitants of the earth human and nonhuman.  In the Navajo world, there are also codes of behavior that were sometimes hard for me to follow as a child.  We were taught to be humble and not to draw attention to ourselves, to favor cooperation over competition (so as not to make ourselves “look better” at another’s expense, or hurt the feelings of someone else), to avoid prolonged eye contact, to be quiet and reserved, to respect those who were older than us, and to reserve opinions until they were asked for.
    —Lori Arviso Alvord, “Full Circle”

It’s only half a tree ‘cause my mama wouldn’t tell me about the other half.  Your daddy was a jackass, she said when I asked, and that’s all she ever said about him.
    —Andrew Lam, “Show and Tell”

The new kid didn’t say nothing.  You could tell he pretty much figured out that Billy’s an asshole ‘cause you don’t need no English for that.
    —Andrew Lam, “Show and Tell”

“If you think it’s hard for you to watch, think how it is for me,” he snapped.  “I’ve raised chickens from birth, and they’re damn cute when they’re little.”  He paused for a second, then added: “I’m a compassionate man.  I have a lot of crippled roosters running around my yard that I should have gotten rid of a long time ago.  It’s a bad business really.”  Then he turned to watch the next fight, the same hungry look in his eyes.
    —Burkhard Bilger, “Enter the Chicken”

The average broiler chicken lives for six weeks, wing to wing with tens of thousands of others.  These gamecocks, by contrast, typically lived for two to three years.  And they lived like pashas.  Every day, from five-thirty in the morning till sundown, three employees tended to their every need


Honey, now if I’m honest
I still don’t know what love is
    —David Gray, “The Other Side”, from A New Day at Midnight

We may race and we my run
We’ll not undo what has been done
Or change the moment when it’s gone
    —David Gray, “The Other Side”, from A New Day at Midnight

I know it would be outrageous
To come on all courageous
And offer you my hand
To pull you up on to dry land
When all I got is sinking sand
The trick ain’t worth the time it buys
I’m sick of hearing my own lies
And love’s a raven when it flies
    —David Gray, “The Other Side”, from A New Day at Midnight

Had Pol Pot released a chapbook I doubtlessly would have taken it home, violating the margins with check marks and little notations reading “That is so true!”
    David Sedaris, Foreword to Jincy Willett’s Jenny and the Jaws of Life

How she despised their mediocrity, the ordinary stupid mess they made of their freedom.
    —Jincy Willett, “Julie in the Funhouse” from Jenny and the Jaws of Life

Inevitability.  Destiny.  Cause and effect, seeds of destruction, sense.  We make sense, like a feather bed, and take comfort there.
    —Jincy Willett, “Julie in the Funhouse” from Jenny and the Jaws of Life

She wanted to say “What are the odds?” but he would just ask “Against what?” and she didn’t know the answer to that.  She had nothing on her side but experience.
    —Jincy Willett, “The Haunting of the Lingards” from Jenny and the Jaws of Life

If he was trying to punish her, he was unsuccessful.  Anita, to her astonishment, reveled in having displeased him.  She was on her own and it made her giddy.
    —Jincy Willett, “The Haunting of the Lingards” from Jenny and the Jaws of Life

Philosophers think of themselves as the guardians of reason, intent beyond other men upon care and accuracy, on following the argument wherever it leads, spotting flaws, rejecting fallacies, insisting on standards.  This is how we justify ourselves as educators, and as respectable voices within the academy, and even in public life. But there is a yawning chasm between our self-image and our practice.  It is in fact a great mistake to think that philosophers gain their followings or their reputations mainly by means of compelling arguments.
The truth is the reverse: when the historical moment is right, people fall in love with the conclusions, and any blemish in the argument is quickly forgiven. The most outright fallacy becomes beatified as a bold and imaginative train of thought; and obscurity actually befits a deep original exploration of dim and unfamiliar interconnections; and arguments that nobody can follow at all become a brilliant roller-coaster ride toward a shift in the vocabulary, a re-formulation of the problem. Follow the star, and the raw edges will easily be tidied up later. The result was nicely put by Bacon nearly four hundred years ago: "The human understanding is not composed of dry light, but is subject to influence from the will and the emotions, a fact that creates fanciful knowledge;man prefers to believe what he wants to be true."
    —Simon Blackburn (from a review of a Donald Davidson book)

“I have the distinct impression that every one of them was being economical with the truth.”
    — Inspector Morse

In the grassy land that surrounds Farmiga’s house in upstate New York sits a pile of ashes. “This is where I burn the scripts,” she said as she circled the scarred earth with her two pet goats. “I stack up all those crass female characters, all those utterly ordinary women, all those hundreds and hundreds of parts that have no substance or meaning and turn them into a blazing pyre.” She kicked some charred pages that had somehow escaped the flames. “It’s really cathartic,” she said. “It’s my revenge on Hollywood insensitivity and greed. The ashes go to the compost. At least the scripts can finally help the world in some way.”
—    Vera Farmiga, in a NY Times interview, Sept. 03, 2006

"A philosopher--is a human being who constantly sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things, who is struck by his own thoughts as from outside, as from above and below, as by his type of experiences and lightning bolts; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a fatal human being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings, crevices and uncanny doings. A philosopher--alas, a being that often runs away from itself, often is afraid of itself--but too inquisitive not to "come to" again--always back to himself."
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses. Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying—and you have to keep trying—eventually you will come across the next item on your list.
    — Jonathan Nolan, “Memento Mori”

They are talkers, the Gelbishes, speech makers and reasoners and aces of wheedling.  Bina’s father nearly talked Landsman out of marrying her.  On the night before the wedding.”
    —Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Brennan studied German in college and learned his Yiddish from some pompous old German  at thie Institute, and he talks, somebody once remarked, “like a sausage recipe with footnotes.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Brennan looks hurt.  A sensitive sould, this macrocephalic gentile, a nurser of slights, resistant to banter and irony.  His convoluted style of talking makes everything he says sound like a joke, a fact that only compounds the man’s need to be taken seriously.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“Please Berko, don’t start having respect for my judgment now,” Landsman says.  “Not after all this work I’ve put into undermining it.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Girls hobbled by long skirts go along braided arm in arm, raucous chains of Verbover girls vehement and clannish as schools of philosophy.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

That’s when Berko opens his door and displays his ancestral Bear bulk in the street.  His profile is regal, worthy of a coin or a carved mountainside.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“When it comes to marriage I like to let other people make the mistakes,” Landsman says.  “My ex-wife, for example.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination.  To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“With all due respect—” Landsman begins.
“An empty formula in your case, surely.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“Look at you.  You are like a house falling down.”
“I know,” Landsman says, feeling his chest tighten.
“I heard you were bad, but I thought they were just trying to cheer me up.”
    —Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world.  She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

A panatela of fried dough not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp-skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets.  You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

When the diminutive woman in the black veil totters through the gates on the arm of her son-in-law, they haul out the questions they have brought.  They unpocket them like stones and throw them all at once.  They vandalize the woman with questions.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

The plane rumbled and shuddered and shook.  All the pins and bolts came loose from Landsman’s skeleton, and his head got turned around backward, and his arms fell off, and his eyeball rolled under the cabin heater.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

In the dreamy seconds that precede his loss of consciousness, the guttural language that Landsman heard Roboy speaking plays like a recording in his ear, and he makes a dazzling leap into impossible understanding, like the sudden consciousness in a dream of one’s having invented a great theory or written a fine poem that in the morning turns out to be gobbledygook.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“Are you taking medication?”
“No, not really.”
“Not really?”
“No.  I don’t want to.”
“You don’t want to.”
“I’m, you know.  Afraid I might lose my edge.”
“That explains the drinking, then,” the doctor says.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“…The fact man there knows perfectly well, or he should, that I hate everyone equally and without favor, regardless of creed or DNA.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

A Messiah who actually arrives is not good to anybody.  A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“Fuck what is written,” Landsman says.  “You know what?”  All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God.
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Susan smiled.  “You of all people should know.  It’s like studying a foreign language.  At first the text looks like gibberish, but as you learn the rules defining its structure, you can start to extract meaning.”
    —Dan Brown, Digital Fortress

“So how should we start?” said Elmer.  “How should we proceed?  What’s our primary issue here?”
“Wait a minute, Elmer,” said Wanda.  “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of things?  Don’t you think we should first determine if determining our primary issue is indeed our highest priority?”
“Which I suppose raises the question of whether determining our highest priority really is in fact our initial goal,” said Old Gus, the oldest Inner Hornerite, who was so old and tired he was shaped something like the letter C, if the letter C was bald and had two gray withered antlers.
    —George Saunders, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

“I’ll tell you what,” said Phil.  “Every day, in addition to your smoloka, I’ll say something nice about each of you.”
“About each of us?” said Vance.  “Oh, wow, I was just thinking you’d say something nice about one of us.  Like one per day?  Alternating?  But now you’re saying you’ll say something nice about each of us every single day?  Plus the smoloka?”
“A smoloka each,” said Phil.  “Do you understand that?”
“A smoloka each?” said Jimmy.
“Wow,” said Vance.  “Wow wow owow.  I’m getting dizzy here.”
“You dream and you dream,” said Jimmy.  “And one day it all comes true.”
    —George Saunders, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

What contempt Julie must have felt toward these needy children.  How she despised their mediocrity, the ordinary stupid mess they made of their freedom.
    —Jincy Willett, “Julie in the Funhouse,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

In fact, in private fact, the Lingards were so perfectly suited that they were not even aware of the joy they took in each other, joy being their natural state.  With other mates they might have known ecstasy, romance, resentment, the thrill and risk of sexual war; they settled, in their ignorance, on kindness and the modest pleasures of companionship.  Their sex really was sunny, pleasant, free of effort or ambition.  They were mated for life, simply, like greylag geese, and like those plain purposeful fliers they were incapable of imagining any other life but this.  They hadn’t the sense to be smug.
    —Jincy Willett, “The Haunting of the Lingards,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

Their one serious argument became for both Lingards a warning sign posted at the verge of a precipice, a dark drop of unguessable duration; and with this sign in mind they built a marriage otherwise unbounded, which was the envy of all who knew them well.
    —Jincy Willett, “The Haunting of the Lingards,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

She had nothing on her side but experience.  Kenneth didn’t have to say anything.  He was attending to her now with every appearance of interest, as though she were a respected colleague, an equal, and they were hashing out some difference of opinion that could go either way.
    —Jincy Willett, “The Haunting of the Lingards,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

These times were special to both of us.  Special, that is, in a way that hung between us like a white, swollen cloud; special in a way that frightened, and made me (me, anyway) so sad that I was always turning to face the passenger window, to let sudden, irrational tears evaporate without falling.
    —Jincy Willett, “My Father, At the Wheel,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

Rather than complementing her he provided her with a standard to work toward, perhaps to surpass.  From the beginning she valued his strengths, and saw that she must either seize advantage of them–let him take responsibility for her, as he was inclined to do—or reject the shelter they offered and so strengthen herself.  She chose to be his equal.
    —Jincy Willett, “Anticipatory of Grief,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

Yes, but on the other hand your astonishing self-awareness makes you a genuinely tragic figure.  And, Honey, cling to this: you’re not ordinary.  Commonplace sufferers find themselves trapped in homely, deformed, or dying bodied; you’re trapped in an inferior soul.  You really are a remarkable woman.  Bravo!
    —Jincy Willett, “The Best of Betty,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

READERS:
Do you think that failure of the imagination can have moral significance?  I mean, is it a character flaw, or just an insufficiency of skill?  Is triteness a sin?  Or what?
    —Jincy Willett, “The Best of Betty,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

As I approach forty I am learning to value the truth for its own sake; I discover that most people have little use for it, beyond its practical applications, except as the flue that holds together rickety constructs of theory and opinion.  As a rule the brighter and better educated select their facts with great care.

…We self-styled philosophers window shop through metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, until we settle on those views that suit us, and then we tailor them to fit our idiosyncracies.
    —Jincy Willett, “Under the Bed,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

We live in an age when self-control, competence, discretion—all are thought abnormal, symptomatic of dysfunction.  “But how do you feel,” they all want to know; their eyes betray them, they are so obvious; some of them dare to ask.  “I’m sorry,” said our Kant and Leibniz specialist, a man I had always credited with sense.  “I’m sorry!  What for?” I asked him, infuriated by his gloomy, hangdog look.  “Are you responsible in some way?  Did you once have adolescent rape fantasies?  Do you believe in common consciousness?”  Shoddy, second-rate thinkers; bullies.  Sentimentalists.  Why, look at you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me!
    —Jincy Willett, “Under the Bed,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

But lately, and too often, as we lie in the dark, I curled away from him, peaceful and fearless, he rises, stealthy, gentle, and leans over me, watching my face; I can feel his breath on my cheek; and I must give him a sign, a sigh, a dreamy moan to ease his mind.  Just like a robot he must rise, prompted by my old, foolish impulse, unworthy of him, as though by watching he could keep me safe; as though the universe concerned itself with us.

There’s the violation.  There’s the damage.  There’s the tragedy.
    —Jincy Willett, “Under the Bed,” from Jennie and the Jaws of Life

Think of Angelina and Jen seesawing o the fulcrum of Brad, who, over the years, has appeared with one or the other, clubbing, attending award ceremonies, shopping, vacationing—usually grinning slightly or looking a little lost.  They daye, marry, quarrel, break up, forgive; they deliver, adopt, and lug babies around, sometimes in dusty climes; they gain too much weight, lose too much weight, and so on, forever and ever.  Some of what you hear about them may even be true, but all of it will be written or spoken in an abusively familiar style—chummy, coarse, knowing.  The tone of the celebrity media is always junior high: “She’s my best friend.  I hate her.”
    —David Denby, “Fallen Idols,” from The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2007

“Other men are carried away by their passions; their actions are not preceded by reflection: they are men who walk in darkness. A philosopher, on the other hand, even in moments of passion, acts only according to reflection: he walks through the night, but he is preceded by a torch”.
—Philosophe, XII:509/285

Pia Svonni the churchwarden is standing in her garden smoking.  She usually holds the cigarette the way girls are supposed to, between her index and middle fingers.  But now she’s holding it firmly between her thumb and her index and middle fingers.  There’s a hell of a difference.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

It’s just that there’s so much.  What shall he do with all the things, the books, the furniture?  He doesn’t know where to start.  It’s an insurmountable obstacle.  As soon as he thinks about it, he’s overwhelmed by such exhaustion that he has to go and lie down, even though it’s the middle of the day.
—Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

When you tore yourself free of a relationship like that, you left great chunks of flesh behind.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

stubborn was a ridiculous word.  You couldn’t contain Mildred in that word.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

Anna-Maria refrained from explaining the difference between believing something and being able to prove it.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

Easier to die for your child in theory than to sit and read to them for quarter of an hour.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

And there was something about her, a microsecond’s hesitation perhaps.  As if she always had to think before she spoke, made a gesture or even smiled.  Nalle doesn’t bother about things like that.  He goes marching into people’s hearts without taking his shoes off.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

…but he had the feeling she had a little box hidden away somewhere.  And in that little box she was collecting all the times he’d made a mistake or overstepped the mark, and when the box was full she’d pack her bags and go.  Without any warning.  It was only girls who cared who gave a warning.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

All except the German.  He sits there like a statue in the middle of the floor, apparently unmoved.  But if you lean forward and look at him carefully, you can see a trembling beneath the skin.  An almost imperceptible quiver of suppressed excitement.  And if it all gets too much for him in the end, if he has to let his feelings out before he breaks in two, he might just stamp with his front paws as he sits there, twice.  Then you know he’s really excited.
    —Åsa Larsson, The Blood Spilt

When I’ve drunk two or three of these, I feel I understand the world better.  At least, I don’t mind so much that I don’t understand it; I can be tolerant of my ignorance.  After three or four, I feel that my ignorance is not only tolerable, but possibly in some way noble.
    —Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

What is an alcoholic?  Someone who’ll steal money from his only friend to buy a drink because the drink is more important and he’d rather lose the friend.  I can’t admire that.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

You might be interested by this idea of “pain,” but in a donnish way.  I mean, I’m “interested” in the special theory of relativity; the idea that there’s a dimension in which space rolls up and time distorts and you come back from a journey younger than you left is certainly intriguing, but it doesn’t have an impact on me, day by day.  That’s what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

That’s part of the trouble with science.  It doesn’t always help.  I don’t find it useful to know that particles may appear in different places without having traveled the distance in between.  I don’t find it enlightening that the only truthful way of thinking of Herr Schrödinger’s cat is as being simultaneously alive and dead.  In fact, I don’t believe it is the only truthful way of thinking of it.  It may be the only logical way of thinking of it, but that’s a different matter isn’t it?  The real problem, though, is that I don’t recall asking after the welfare of his cat in the first place.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

I did ask him—Stanley—one what the purpose of our work was.

“Are we meant to offer new insights into these books or what?”

He looked appalled.

I went on: “I mean, it’s unlikely that I’ll find something in Urn Burial or Bartholemew Fair that people before me haven’t seen.”

“Yes, Mr. Egleby.  Very unlikely.”

“Or should we be trying to find our more about the life of the author or how the times in which he lived affected his work?”

“Good God, no.  That’s journalism.”

“So what are we doing?”

“Studying the text and reading around it.”

“To what end?”

“Scholarship.”
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

I suppose my mind was trying too hard to get a grip on this place, to anchor it for me, because I had the strong impression that I was really outside time or place, that the hostile otherness of my surroundings was such that my own personality was starting to disintegrate.  I was vanishing.  My character, my identity, had unraveled.  I was a particle of fear.
    I guess I was a little lonely then.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

I pulled my arm away because I didn’t want to hear this.  I actually needed to feel I was alone.  Why did I need the grief of others?  Wasn’t mine enough?  Why did I need to feel that this abandonment was plural, when it was heavy enough singular?
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

You were meant to know what to do.  How?  Instinct?  Tarot?  Sortilege?  No, just by being a good crew member, by not making a fuss, by just knowing.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

And it’s true you can’t bend with each fashionable wind—you can’t be like the Church of England, constantly updating its eternal verities.  Either Christ was God, in which case He knew what He was doing hen He chose male apostles only; or he was a hapless Galilean sexist now ripe for a rethink.  Not both.  That’s what I think about co-res: a truth is either good for all time or it isn’t true at all.  (On the other hand, it would mean better bathrooms.)
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Significant things happen so slowly that it’s seldom you can say: it was then—or then.  It’s only after the change is fully formed that you can see what’s happened.  We were doing World War Two in History at this time.  To the occupied French in 1940, co-operating with the Germans was not only a practical but even a noble course of action, according to old “Sapper” Hill—one that was enshrined in article two of the armistice and boasted of by the French government.  Was there one fatal moment when co-operation went too far, so that they found they were doing the Occupier’s dirty work for him?  Was there a day—an hour—when in deporting Jews they stopped following the Nazis and began to lead them?  Was it when they offered to fill the trains with Jews of French as well as other nationalities?  Was it when they said the Jews could be taken from the Free as well as the Occupied zone?  Was it when they offered the Jewish children—to fill the “quotas”?
    Yes, no, both, all.  There was a day, there was a moment when something reasonable changed into something that would haunt them forever.  But it wasn’t visible at the time, because at the time everything is only a tiny addition to what’s there.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Notoriety is such a very odd thing.  From the moment her face appeared on that poster, Jennifer has stopped being herself.
    Vanished girl.  Gone.  Something pious has attached itself to her.  It’s no longer possible to think of her as the girl in the next seat at the lecture.  It’s impossible to think of her at all without a whiff of sanctimony.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Time makes us pointless.  If time is as we envisage it, our lives are not worth living.  Time is probably not as we envisage it—sequential.  But since we are incapable of viewing it any other way, it might as well be.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear.  What’s the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

I suppose that all human “personalities” are at some level makeshift or provisional, but it’s unusual to eel oneself come apart in such a molecular way.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

What I liked about it was a version lived by others.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

I feel good when I leave the darkness of the cinema.  It makes me feel my life is important.  For a few minutes I stroll along the dark streets, thinking of myself as someone in a film—a man with a character, a destiny.  I become aware of my clothes and my physical mass; of my quiddity, my value.
    Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Suppose, though, you’re not sure that what you’re doing is at all worthwhile.  Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle.  It’s easy, it pays quite well.  But really it’s a distraction.  It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.
    Because what you ought to be doing is weighing up the facts.  If the history of Homo sapiens so far were represented as a single day, an average human lifespan would represent a little over half a second.  That’s your lot, that’s all you have of living, then you return to the unconscious eternity that came before and will close back over you—over your half-second…
    So what you must do—being an intelligent, thinking creature—is make a very careful, well-informed judgement about how best you can spend your one and only half-second.  You analyse yourself and your abilities; you match them to the world, its ways and possibilities, and you make a solemn decision to do what would most contribute to the well-being of the world and of yourself.
    Except you’ve got a deadline, Friday at noon.  And your lover coming round on Tuesday.  And there’s football on.
    This “busy” thing isn’t a commitment, it’s an evasion.
    And what are we avoiding?  Facing the problem of the one half-second.  Because it that’s how it really is, if that’s time, then nothing is worthwhile and nothing makes sense.
    If time is not really like then, then al might work out yet.  And in fact—good news— we do believe time is not linear.  The trouble is—bad news—that our brains can only think of it as linear, therefore we’re doomed to see our lives as pointless.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

They’re so attached to their patterns that they’ve forgotten rule one of human behavior: there are no patterns.  People just do things.  There’s no such thing as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

So, grief, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t look like a deep feeling that symmetrically mourns the absent shape; it looks like a disintegration of the acquired personality.  It looks like going mad.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

This happiness.  I think this is what happiness is.  I haven’t got it yet, but I can sense it out there.  I feel I’m close to it.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Anger.  I’ve found, at moments in my life, that this emotion can cut free from the thing that provoked it and become an independent force.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

They brought a chair.  This man put his arm round my shoulders.  That’s why I cried.  That small kindness.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Something odd was happening in my head.  Although I was receiving a large amount of random information, I didn’t feel I knew any more about anything.  On the contrary, I felt that, as far as data in the brain were concerned, I had suffered a net loss.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

It was important not to become too drunk.  In order to open up the past, go back, relive and do better, one needed to be relatively sober.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

It occurred to me as I stood there, waiting for the effect, that at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

…which made me wonder yet again at the nature of the anthropoid Homo sapiens, this functional ape with the curse of consciousness—that useless gift that allows him, unlike other animals, to be aware of his own futility.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

And however resourceful he was, however patient and fortunate in the events of his life that followed, he was like a creature in a next of imprisoning boxes who could never really break free.  That was his world and any attempt to persuade him that it was merely a “subjective” or “individual” experience could never convince him.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

The failure of any other faculty we could bear with patience, even with humour, but not the failure of the one that distinguished us from all previous species.  That is beyond irony, beyond cruelty.
—Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“Don’t be more of an ass than God made you!”
    —Louis Auchincloss, “Pa’s Darling”

Here we’re happy just to make a living and get some kind of fix on reality.  Our hands are full trying to cope with the world as it is.  We don’t waste a lot of time on the world as it ought to be.
    —Joseph Epstein, “My Brother Eli”

“All possibilities have been considered.  My aunt is a trained aircraft technician.  My brother is a trained philosopher but has worked at a gas station.”
    —Roy Kesey, “Wait”

That morning, Glynnis’s father drove her to the new school on his way to work.  Her mother had refused to come along.  “American children bring guns to school,” she said, and kissed Glynnis on the top of the head.  “So try not to piss anyone off.”
    —Aryn Kyle, “Allegiance”

It struck him that his marriage, like most of his friends’ marriages, had failed because each member of the couple had been so wary of being asked to give more than his or her fair share.
    —Eileen Pollack, “The Bris”

Again Marcus nodded, as if, as long as he didn’t speak, he couldn’t be accused of lying.  Although really, what was so awful about a lie?  The immorality lay in the cowardice the lie was meant to hide.
    —Eileen Pollack, “The Bris”

…he composed his own prayer of thanks for having been allowed to repay his father even a part of all he owed.  Although really, it didn’t make much sense to keep track of such matters, any more than it made sense to measure what the sun and stars gave a person as opposed to what that person gave the sun and stars.
    —Eileen Pollack, “The Bris”

…but here he was, wanting to talk about her, as if what she’d produced didn’t matter.  It was as if he’d asked her to take off her clothes.
    —Richard Russo, “Horseman”

What is what she possessed — what her other professors admired — was merely a facility?  What if she was just doing what she was good at, and nothing deeper?  “this elusive thing?” she heard herself say, in a frightened, childlike voice.  “I won’t succeed until I find it?”
    “Oh, you’ll success just fine,” he told her, waving that concern aside.  “You’ll just never be any good.”
    —Richard Russo, “Horseman”

Each disposed, for reasons both mysterious and profound, to think better of people than perhaps they deserved — whereas her own inclination had always been to think less of them.  Bellamy had tried to warn her.  He’d seen how skilled she was, how coldly persuasive she could be; he’d known that she would use the study of literature to distance herself.  Maybe he even foresaw how thins would go for her and Robbie, how she’d win every argument in their marriage until finally the marriage was gone.
    —Richard Russo, “Horseman”

So this, she thought, was heartbreak.  She’d read about it, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to get any closer.  She’d always suspected that epiphany was overrated.  Even now her inclination was to remain right where she was, the dining room window between herself and her husband and child, safe from them and they from her.
    —Richard Russo, “Horseman”

In response to interrogatives he stroked his upper lip with his forefinger and seemed to wait for the intelligent part of the question to emerge.
    —Jim Shepherd, “Sans Farine”

It’s always better to be the dumper instead of the dumpee, and if you have to be the loser, then you need to find a way to be superior.  And that was going to take abut seven pounds for me, as many as ten for Molly, who doesn’t have my discipline and had been doing some serious break-up eating for the past three weeks.  She went face down in the Ding Dongs, danced with the Devil Dogs, and became a Ho Ho ho.
        —Laura Lippman, “The Crack Cocaine Diet”

It’s true enough he doted on her, but he had more eyes than one, and they traveled…
        —R. T. Smith, “Ina Grove”

I guessed he was six seven or more, close to three hundred pounds.  The type of man you have to shoot twice.
        —Scott Wolven, “Vigilance”

“…I want to make sure you and I have an understanding.  The law doesn’t stop a thing.  Consequences only come after and after is too late, far as I’m concerned…We’re not all hicks and cousin-fuckers up here,” he said over his shoulder.  “Do your business somewhere else.  You mistook kind for simple.”
        —Scott Wolven, “Vigilance”

If I was lucky to be alive, I rarely knew it.  Normal men get to be things.  Sons and husbands, fathers and friends.  I was not any of things.  I tried, but this is me telling you I failed.
        —Scott Wolven, “Vigilance”

This is, after all, the century of the illusion of knowledge. We firmly believe that the world in which we live is ultimately comprehensible.
    —Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor

‘Who’s Shirley Temple?’ Elínborg was astonished at Sigurder Òli’s ignorance.  ‘Don’t you know who she was?  Didn’t you study in America?’

‘Was she a Hollywood star?’ Sigurdur Òli asked, still looking at the poster.

‘She was a child star,’ Erlendur said curtly.  ‘So she’s dead in a sense anyway.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘You’re supposed to say “Should have”, not “should of”.

She gave him a pitying look.

‘Do you think it matters?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Erlendur said.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘Why do they always talk about the missionary position?  What’s the mission?…And then there’s one group that uses condoms more than other people.’

‘Really?’ Sigurdur Òli repeated.  ‘Hookers?  Do you think there are any here?’

Erlendur nodded.

‘They do a lot of missionary work at hotels.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘Feel free to have a cry,’ he said.

Eva looked at him.

‘I don’t deserve to cry,’ she said.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘What’s the name of the game anyway?’

‘It’s none of your business, if the game…actually has a name.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘…if he’s dead then it stops there.’

‘That’s generally the rule.’

‘What?’

‘If you’re dead, it stops.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘The other option you have is to come to terms with this fucking life, as you call it, and put up with the suffering it involves.  Put up with the suffering we all have to endure, always, to get through that and find and enjoy the happiness and joy that it brings us as well, in spite of our being alive.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

…he was now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a designer label on one of the breast pockets, which he wore like a medal rewarding him for absurdly expensive shopping.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘People talk too much,’ Erlendur said.  ‘People should shut up more often.  Then they wouldn’t give themselves away so much.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

‘Instead of trying to rebuild something from the ruins,…I dug myself down deeper into it because it’s comfortable there and it looks like sanctuary.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Voices

I’m old, he thinks.  Old and worn out.  Every morning when I wake up I’m surprised all over again that I’m 70 years old.
    —Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers

That’s too noble a word.  Love.  It’s not for the likes of us.  Someone who has been a farmer for more than 40 years, who has worked every day bowed over the heavy Scanian clay, does not use the word “love” when he talks about his wife.  In our lives, love has always been something totally different.
    —Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers

…he had been deeply hurt that she seemed prepared to trade her entire past for a life that did not include him, even as a memory.
    —Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers

Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning.  A sneering face that laughed scornfully at every attempt he made to manage his life.
    —Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers

“One can only fight for survival,” the major said.  “I include the fight for freedom and independence.  Whatever a person does beyond that is something they chose to do, not something they have to do.”
    —Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga

“A promise from an unknown person is worthless,” Wallender said.
    —Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga

One was born at such and such a time, and one died at such and such a time: that was about as far as he ever got when it came to contemplating his earthly existence.
    —Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga

I started to kill because I myself was dead.  When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then.  A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow small and smaller.  I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness.  I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies.  Apartheid was my real father.  I learned what no-one should need to learn.  To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country.  A lie enforced by the police about the natural distinctions between white and black, the superiority of white civilization.  That superiority turned me into a murderer, sangoma.  And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller as a child.  For what has this Apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls?  When our despair exploded in furious destruction, the whites failed to see the despair and hatred which is soul boundlessly greater.  All the things my thoughts and feelings being split asunder as if with a sword.  I can manage without one of my fingers.  But how can I live without knowing who I am?
    —Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

I hid in my own silence.  There I could make myself invisible.
    —Henning Mankell, The Fifth Woman

Death always arrives at the wrong time – something is left undone.
    —Henning Mankell, The Fifth Woman

Was the fact that what made death so terrifying the fact that you had to be dead for such a long time?
    —Henning Mankell, The Fifth Woman

“When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks.  I even learned how to do it in school myself.  Then suddenly one day it was over.  Socks with holes in them were thrown out.  No-one bothered to repair them.  The whole society changed.  ‘Wear it out and toss it’ was the only rule that applied.  As long as it was just a matter of our socks, the change didn’t make much difference.  But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code.  I think it changed our view of right and wrong, of what you were allowed to do to other people and what you weren’t.”
    —Henning Mankell, The Fifth Woman

“What is it you’ve had enough of when you take your own life?  Life itself.  The boredom.  The weariness that hits you every morning when you look at your face in the mirror.”
    —Henning Mankell, The Fifth Woman

“When you called, we were in the middle of an argument.  Just a stupid little argument, the kind you have when you don’t have the energy for the big ones anymore.”
    —Henning Mankell, One Step Behind

He heard how irritated and disapproving he sounded and knew there was no reason to take his tiredness out on her.  But there was no one else around.
    —Henning Mankell, One Step Behind

He wanted to reach out and touch her, to hold on to something normal and real.
    —Henning Mankell, One Step Behind

“WE speak of before and after the birth of Christ, but it would be more accurate to speak of before and after the invention of personal identification numbers.  When I was young, you had to make your decision on the spot.  Was the person standing before you honest?  Did he mean what he said?  Did he have integrity, or was he a liar?”
    —Henning Mankell, One Step Behind

“No work would be possible without coffee.”
    —Henning Mankell, One Step Behind

A person who died eventually became a person who never existed.
    —Henning Mankell, Firewall

He was most vulnerable during these hours before sunrise, left to the dark and his own memories.
    —Henning Mankell, Firewall

Every morning is the worst, he thought.  Without fail.  At least all those mornings that you wake up at five in the morning and can’t fall back asleep.
    —Henning Mankell, Firewall

Ronnie’s former sergeant suggested that in these repressive times, supervisors like Treakle were harder to get rid of than Rasputin and jock itch.
    —Joseph Wambaugh, Hollywood Crows

But Gert was sick of all the skid row derelicts and the smells associated with them: urine and feces, vomit and blood.  And, worst of all, the unbearably sweet, sickly smell of decaying flesh from corpses that had lain dead under bridges and in cardboard shelters.  Some had been there for so long that even the flies covering them were dead.  At least those corpses didn’t smell.  And the living weren’t much better off, derelicts with their legs and feet covered with clumps of maggots that were eating them alive while the wretches ate whatever they could beg at the back doors of downtown eateries.
    —Joseph Wambaugh, Hollywood Crows

“Having a Hispanic name is bogus,” Gil finally said that night to the senior officer.

“Read the nameplate on your uniform,” Dan Applewhite retorted.  “Your Hispanic.  That means something today.  Look around Hollywood Station.  Except for the midwatch, white Anglos are in the minority.  Half of the current academy class his Hispanic.  L.A. is on the verge of being reclaimed by Mexico.”

“Okay, look at it this way,” the probie said.  “What if my Peruvian grandpa had come from neighboring Brazil, where they have Portuguese names and don’t speak Spanish?  Would I still rate diversity points?”

Don’t make this too complicated just because you been to college,” Dan said.  “It’s all about color and language.”

Gil said, “I know about as much Spanish as you do, and my skin is lighter than yours and my eyes are bluer.  If you wanna work out the math, I’m exactly one-fourth Peruvian, and I don’t think any of that is mestizo in the first place.”
    —Joseph Wambaugh, Hollywood Crows

Referring to the May 1 immigration rally in MacArthur Park, which got negative national negative attention when the LAPD used force on demonstrators and reporters, F.X. Mulroney sneered and said, “This is May Day all over again.  Like, oh, dear me, let’s not rough people up.  Shit!  Sister Mary Ignatius tuned us up worse than that when I was an the third fucking grade!”
    —Joseph Wambaugh, Hollywood Crows

Women, thought Mma Ramotswe, are sometimes like plump chickens in the yard, while outside, circling the fence, were the hyenas, the men.  It was not a happy way of envisaging the relation between the sexes, but time and time again she had seen this particular drama played out in exactly that way.  And hyenas, one had to admit, were surely destined to break the hearts of chickens; they could do nothing else.
    —Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

There were some who believed that one should be direct in such cases and say exactly what one was thinking.  So one might say, “A traditionally built person, like you, should not wear stripes that run across the way.  Your stripes should go up and down.”  That, at least, was direct, and unambiguous, but it could give offence, especially in these days when fewer people wished to be considered traditionally built.  Mma Ramotswe had never been able to understand that, and considered it one of the very worst features of modern society that people should be ashamed to be of traditional build, cultivating instead a look that was bony and positively uncomfortable.  Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there’s no reason to show it.
    —Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

…she was worried about those cases where the husband had great difficulty in finding the means to pay the bride price.  People get themselves into debt; they spent money which should have been spent on other things.  But most of all she thought that the whole idea made women seem like property—things that could be bought.
    —Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the sky, a rainbow.
…she was worried about those cases where the husband had great difficulty in finding the means to pay the bride price.  People get themselves into debt; they spent money which should have been spent on other things.  But most of all she thought that the whole idea made women seem like property—things that could be bought.
    —Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

“And I feel sorry for the baboons,” said Mma Ramotswe.  “I know that it is silly to say that.  But I suddenly felt very sorry for them.  They are just baboons, but they are dressing up for the wedding.  Why is that so sad, Mma?”

“Because it is always sad when people try to do things that they cannot do,” said Mma Potokwane.  “The baboons are very sad for that reason.”
    —Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors


Mma Ramotswe was right: evil repaid with retribution, with punishment, had achieved half its goal; evil repaid wit kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small, petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair.
    —Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

People always say, You know, when you don’t have a clue.  You know…fill in the blank.  You know…make this easier for me by not having to say it.
    Diane Mott Davidson, Dying for Chocolate

Pinned by her seat belt, she felt her stomach flip and her pulse race, and for what?  For the hollow honor of beig the first to say our loud what she had always been the first to think.  As with all her father’s contests, there was no prize, no point.  Since she could no longer be guaranteed victory, she did what she always did: She pretended not to care.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

She had sideswiped a white SUV, and although her car was so much smaller, the SUV seemed to reel from the touch, an elephant felled by a peashooter.  She glimpsed a girl’s face, or thought she did, a face with an expression not so much frightened as surprised by the realization that anything could collide with one’s neat, well-ordered life at any time.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

She had netted crawfish from Gwynns Falls and put together an elaborate aquarium, but all four had died.  Her father theorized that clean water was a shock to their systems after the murky, polluted stream and her exploration of that thesis had earned her an A anyway.  Thirty years later she was beginning to have a clue how the crawfish had felt.  You knew what you know, you wanted what you wanted, even if was literally scum.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

What was the good of an older sister if she didn’t act like one?
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“I know.  I know.  Something bad happened, something you seldom speak of.  And you know what?  You’re right to keep it inside.  Everyone says just the opposite, but they’re wrong.  It’s better not to speak of some things.  Whatever you’ve done, whatever happened, you don’t need to justify it to me or anyone.  You don’t need to justify it even to yourself.  Keep it locked up.”
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

Infante had once told Nancy that she didn’t know what bad was if she thought it was something found in a doughnut.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

…how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“Relationships are chess for women,” he said.  “They can see the whole board, plan way ahead.  They’re the queens, after all.  We’re the kings, limited to one square in any direction, one defense for the whole fucking game.”
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

The lawyer, Hertzbach, appeared very much the big fish in a small pond, the kind of attorney who had a billboard on the interstate and a converted Victorian for his office.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

His generation was going to get it right, be perfect in every way, unlock every mystery.  After all, they had iPods.  It seemed to make them think that anything was possible, that they would be able to control life the way they controlled and managed their music, flipping around on a little trak wheel.  Right, sweetie.  It was just one big playlist waiting to be designed, the brave new world of Tivo.  What you wanted, when you wanted, all the time.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

Hope was an impossible emotion to live with, he was finding out, a demanding and abusive companion.  Emily Dickinson had called it the thing with feathers, but her hope was small and dainty, a friendly presence perched inside the rib cage.  The hope that Dave Bethany knew also had feathers, but it was more of a griffin, with glinting eyes and sharp talons.  Claws, he corrected himself.  The griffin had the head of an eagle but the body of a lion.  Dave Bethany’s version of hope sat on his chest, working its claws in and out, piercing the meaty surface of his heart.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

The problem was that sex had been something she used to keep herself safe, a defensive posture.  Okay, okay, I’ll do it, don’t hurt me again.  It was a currency to her now, and she didn’t know how to change it back.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

There was nothing sour in this girl, no life taint.  Her parents were probably still married, even still in love.  She was breezing through school, popular with males and females alike.  He could imagine birds alighting on her shoulders, as if she were some Disney cartoon princess.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“Even goody-goodies think about such things.  In fact, I would say that’s what defines us.  We’re always thinking about the things we don’t dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.”

“Was Sunny a goody-goody?”

“No, she was something worse.”

“What was that?”

“Someone who wanted to be bad but didn’t know how.”
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

It was weird, seeing this sixty-something guy all quivery with a crush.  Didn’t this ever end?  Shouldn’t it end?  Lately, when every other commercial seemed to be about impotence—ED, as the ads called it, as if that were better—Infante had found himself thinking that it was silly to fight the body, that it must be almost a kind of relief to have your dick lie down on the job, done at last.  His would never give up the ghost, of course, he knew that much about himself, and it would be a burn if you got impotence as a side effect of some medication.  But he’d been counting on, even hoping for, the end of the emotional insanity, that giddy rush of caring what another person thought of you.  Watching Willoughby, he realized that it ended as everything else did—with death.
—Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

Erlendur turned around and looked up to Marion standing in the doorway and he saw how age had left its mark on that air of respectability, how rounded shoulders could diminish dignity and a wrinkled face bear witness to a difficult life.  It was a long time since he’d been to that flat and he had been thinking, while he sat facing Marion in the chair, about the treatment that time hands out to people.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City

“What am I supposed to think?  Tell me that!” Erlendur shouted.  “Can you possibly handle this endless self-pity?  What a bloody loser you can be sometimes.  Do you really feel so good in that company you keep that you can’t think there’s anything better for you?  What right do you have to treat your life like that?  What right do you have to treat the life inside you like that?  Do you really think things are so hoorible for you?  Do you really think no-one in the world feels as bad as you?  I’m investigating the death of a girl who didn’t even reach that age of five.  She fell ill and died.  Something no-one understands destroyed her and killed her.  Her coffin was three feet long.  Can you hear what I’m saying?  What right have you got to live?  Tell me that!”
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City

“It always seems to be the bloody perverts who seem happiest of all.  Smile at the world as if there’s never anything gnawing away at their bloody consciences.”
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City

“You think it won’t affect you.  You reckon you’re strong enough to withstand that sort of thing.  You think you can put on armour against it over the years and can watch all the filth from a distance as if it’s none of your business, and try to keep your senses.  But there isn’t any distance.  And there’s no armour.  No-one’s strong enough.  The repulsion haunts you like an evil spirit that burrows into your mind and doesn’t leave you in peace until you believe that the filth is life itself because you’ve forgotten how ordinary people live…”
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City

“Everyone always said I never resembled my father or mother or anyone else in my family.”

“I’ve always had that feeling too,” Erlendur said.

“What do you mean?”

“That you were a bastard.”

“Glad you’ve got your sense of humor back,” Sigurdur Òli said.  “You’ve been a little distant recently.”

“What sense of humour?” Erlendur said.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City

“Children are philosophers.  My daughter asked me once at the hospital, ‘Why have we got eyes?’  I said it was so we could see.”

Einar paused.  “She corrected me,” he said as if to himself.  He looked at Erlendur.  “She said it was so we could cry.”
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Jar City

He pondered how parents managed to keep their children at arm’s length until all that remained was acquired, polite behavior, with an artificial sincerity that sprang from common experience rather than real love.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Silence of the Grave

“…The pain is like a fortress around a sorrow I don’t want to release.  Maybe I should have done that long ago, to come to terms with the life that was saved and give it a purpose…”
    —Arnaldur Indridason, Silence of the Grave

The officers from Hafnarfjördur were fiddling around with yellow plastic tape to cordon off the area, but had discovered they had nothing to attach it to.  Sigurdur Òli watched their efforts and thought he could understand why village-idiot jokes were always set in Hafnarfjördur.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

‘I think it’ll make her famous,’ Sigurdur Òli said.

‘Does she want to be?’ Erlendur asked.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Sigurdur Òli said.

‘Cobblers,’ Erlendur said.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

They had already gone back and forth through this conversation innumerable times.  Neither believed in an inscrutable god who demanded sacrifices such as the man’s wife and daughter.  Neither was a fatalist.  They did not believe that all things were predetermined and impossible to influence.  Both believed in simple coincidences.  Both were realists and accepted the fact that had the man not phoned his wife and delayed her, she would not have been at the crossing at the moment that the drunken driver in the Range Rover went through the red light.  However, Sigurdur Òli did not blame the man for what happened, and thought his reasoning was absurd.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

Erlendur placed the cylinder by the sofa and an old memory of a lonely and absurd death suddenly crossed his mind when he saw Marion’s hand reach for the oxygen.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

‘Are you looking forward to it?’ Marion asked.

‘I never look forward to anything,’ Erlendur said.
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

‘There are two things that don’t fit.’

‘I’m not interested.  Get your arse out of here.’

‘It’s too clever.’

‘Huh.’

‘And you’re too stupid.’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake


‘…Coincidences don’t come from nowhere.  They’re consequences of the conditions we create…’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

‘…She was dirty – no, she was filthy.  And you know what she wanted to know?’

Erlendur shook his head.

‘She wanted to know if I’d seen you,’ Sindri said.  ‘Don’t you think that’s weird?  The only thing she wanted to know was if I’d seen you.  Why do you think that is?  Why do you think she’s worried about that?  Amongst all that squalor and misery?  Why do you think that is?’
    —Arnaldur Indridason, The Draining Lake

Beatreice’s words weer taking root, burrowing into her consciousness.  She stiffened, not moving a muscle, unreachable during the time that the message about her John sank in, that he was never going to come home again, never hug her, never walk into the kitchen, never do anything again.
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

It was the look the sheep gave Beatrice at that moment, that tenth of a second before it happened.  The white of the eye glimmered, the expression full of hurt, no suggestion of fear, more as if posing a question.  It was as if there weren’t room enough in the world for her despair, although the pen was so spacious, the pastures so rich.
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

He was freezing but wanted to dwell in his memories.  Once he got home, life’s fundamental shittiness would no doubt reassert itself.
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

“…He came from a background where you weren’t supposed to try to be better than anyone else.”
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

“How are things with her?” Beatrice asked.
“She’s bored,” Sammy said.  “She’s thinking of selling the baby.”
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

Lennart would have been able to protext his brother.  If only John had told him, Lennart would have watched his back like a hawk around the clock.  That’s what brothers were for.  But John had kept Lennart in the dark on this and that was half the heartache.
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

Thoughts of Jan-Erik’s wife and his kids were interspersed in people’s minds with the most troubling point: It could have been me.  These words were not actually spoken aloud by anyone—that would have seemed unprofessional and disrespectful—but it was there, strengthening the sense of connection with the deceased.
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

“I know what you’re thinking, but once upon a time Little John and Vincent Hahn were children.  You know, little kids, like the ones you see in the street.  I thought about that in the fall, when school started.  I saw the little boys running down the streets with their backpacks and shorts and thought: There goes a thief, a wife beater, a drug addict, or a dealer…”
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi

…Had it been right to ask Erki to put away a hundred thousand?  He had raised the issue of morality, but the fact was that it was John’s money.  Even if the starting sum had been stolen, then surely the poker winnings were his?  If the money from the workshop was subtracted perhaps there would be even more than a hundred thousand, and this money would go to Berit and Justus in any case.  This was how she was going to construct her inner moral defense.
—Kjell Eriksson, The Princess of Burundi


Laura Hindersten gave a short laugh.  It was a quick, dry salvo that reminded the officer of a teacher she had had in elementary school, someone who had poisoned the children’s existence.  She had emanated pride mixed with embittered exasperation at having to put up with such thick-headed pupils.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

Laura was named after this woman from the fourteenth century who had become a literary concept and the object of research.  Many times she herself felt like a concept.  As a teenager she started to doubt whether or not she lived, if she even existed here and now.  What did she mean to her father?  She pinched herself, experienced pain, cried, and felt her cheek grow wet with tears, but did that prove her existence?
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

Her father needed an audience.  Someone who did not talk back, did not engage in sparring about the text.  Someone who simply listened, enraptured.  Listened to the words that intoxicated, that carried one away, transformed and gave life meaning.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

Laura was erecting a strong line of defense around the house.  She placed the ridiculously ugly white plastic furniture in the center of the garden only to taunt the nearest neighbor, the aesthete who edged his lawn every other week.  The furniture shone, jumped out at the professor and his wife.  Later she completed this arrangement with a sun umbrella that loudly proclaimed the superiority of Budweiser.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

Words, words, words, into infinity.  She did not want them, the artfully arranged, duplicitous assurances that people surround themselves with.  She silenced the words and eradicated their falseness.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

His casual speech diminished her.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

Even though they were plant eaters there was something carnivorous about the way they smacked and chomped.  They did not eat like humans, who inhaled their food and chewed frenetically in order to swallow quickly and load up on more.  The cows ground their fodder, sensually, slowly, and with pleasure, paused from time to time and goggled with dull curiosity.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

Laura didn’t know what the word meant.  She understood the word but not how this fame would affect her and her family.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

After Fritzén, the chief of police took the stand.  He spoke for a long time about nothing.
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

“…The essence of freedom lies in solving problems as they arise, don’t you think?  If you accept the fact that the problems are unsolvable then you become half a person.  An impoverished person.  Isn’t that right?”
    —Kjell Eriksson, The Cruel Stars of the Night

He couldn’t recall having experienced anything funnier; not since the former chief of police ran over his wife on a pedestrian crossing, in any case.  The image of the prosecuting attorney, Ferrati, in frilly knickers was something he could hide in the innermost recesses of his mind, to be dug out whenever it suited him for the rest of his life.  Ponder and enjoy it…It was priceless.  As he stood there glowering at the gorilla, it struck him that his present state was something reminiscent of a kind of happiness.

Measured by his own standards, at least.

It didn’t last long, more’s the pity; but at least it was real.
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

“Mr. Mitter, you have no memories at all from that night, but nevertheless you maintain that you didn’t kill your wife.  You have had a month to think about it, and I have to say that I’d expected rather more logic from a teacher of philosophy.  Why can’t you at least admit that you can’t remember if you killed her or not?”

“I wouldn’t forget something like that.”

“Excuse me.”

“I wouldn’t forget having drowned my wife.  I don’t remember having killed her…ergo, I didn’t kill her.”
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

He pressed his forehead against the wall.  It felt good.  At any moment he could choose to be completely normal; it was an act of the will, nothing else—to choose the thinnest and most durable and grayest of all the lines of thought and cling to it like a blind priest.

How did he not miss her?

In the same way as you don’t miss the unbearable.

As a tiger doesn’t miss its own death.
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

The last thing to come to him was an image.

An old picture, something he might have drawn himself once.  Or taken from a book.

It was an image of death, and it was a very personal truth.

An ox.

And a swamp.

This was his life.  An ox that had fallen into a swamp.

Sinking slowly down into the mud.  Sinking slowly into death.

When night came, a calm and starry night, only his head was still above ground, and the last thing…the very last thing to disappear, was the ox’s surprised eye, starting up at the myriad starrs.

That was the final image.

And when night closed in over the eye, everything became nothing.
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

“I’m coming to the same point, though I have to say I get there a bit faster…”
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

…There was something about this case, about both these murders, that was constantly forcing everything onto a downward path, and leaving a nasty taste in his mouth.  A feeling of disgust and impotence, similar to what he used to experience every time he was confronted by a violent murder; when he’d still been a young police officer who believed he could bring about change; before the daily confrontation with a certain kind of behavior blunted him sufficiently for him to be able to carry out his job properly.
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

…He stood up, and Van Veeteren noted that he was slightly intoxicated.  He was no longer the prototype of success.  In Van Veeteren’s eyes, that was without a shadow of a doubt a distinct improvement.
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

…He was full to the brim with prejudices, and he was slightly irritated to find that they had not been reinforced by what he had seen and heard that morning…
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

“Let’s say Monday.  But if you find the murderer before then, do feel free to let us know.”
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

…The morning paper was spread out in front of him, and suddenly, he had that feeling.

A feeling of well-being.  He tried to suppress it, but it was there all the time, warm and persistent and totally unambiguous.  A feeling of gratitude for the infinite riches of life.
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

“A novel, a film, or a play, Münster—they are nothing but stuffed life.  Life that has been captured and stuffed like a taxidermist stuffs a dead animal.  They are created so that we can reasonably easily examine it.  Clamber out of current reality and look at it from a distance.  Are you with me?...Anyway, if there have to be plots and connecting threads ensuring that stuffed life, the artificial version, hangs together, then of course the same thing must apply to the genuine article, to real life.  That’s the point…Obviously, you can choose to live a pointless life if you want to—watch the film backwards, for Christ’s sake, or hold the book upside down as you read it.  But don’t kid yourself that if you do, you’ve understood anything.  You see, there’s not just one, but thousands of points, whole series of points…patterns…rules…determinants…If we were a moveie, you and me,” said Van Veeteren, snapping a toothpick, “or a book, then of course it would be unforgivable of me to tell you certain things at this point in time.  It would be a kick in the teeth for cinemagoers, an insult to the genre as such.  Perhaps also an underestimate of your talents, Münster.  Are you with me?”

“No,” said Münster.

“A crime against the determinant,” said Van Veeteren, looking just for a second as if he might smile.  “If we don’t have a religion, the least we can do is try to live as if we were a book or a film.  These are the only hints you are going to get, Münster.”
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“No.”

“I didn’t ask if you were guilty.  I asked if you knew why you’re here.  An appeal for information about you has been featured on radio and television, and in sixty-eight different newspapers, together with your name and picture.  And despite that, you claim that you don’t know why you are here.  Are you thinking of pleading that you are an idiot, or that you can’t read?”
—Håkan Nesser, Mind’s Eye

“As I said,” he went on, “it’s an unusually unsavory body.”

Unsavory? Münster thought, and recalled how Meusse had once told him how his life had been changed and made more miserable by his less-than-uplifting profession.  How he had been impotent by the age of thirty, how his wife had left him when he was thirty-five, how he’d turned vegetarian at forty, and how he’d more or less stopped eating solid food by the time he was fifty…His own body and its functions had become more and more repulsive as the years went by.  Something he could only feel disgust and aversion for, he had confessed to Münster and Van Veeteren one afternoon when, for whatever reason, the drinks had become more numerous than usual.
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

The silence that fell in the room felt almost like a power cut, it seemed to Rooth.
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

…he suddenly felt pain creeping up upon him: a chilling fear but also a realization, that this moment must pass.  This second of absolute and perfect happiness—one of the ten to twelve that comprised a whole life, and was possibly even the meaning of it…
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

“You forget who you’re talking to,” he said.  “Are you familiar with Klimke’s razor?”

“Klimke’s razor?”

This time the surprise was genuine.

“Yes.  Simple guidelines for civilized and intelligent conversation.”

Hiller said nothing.  Van Veeteren leaned back and closed his eyes for a few seconds before continuing.  Might as well give him a salvo, he thought.  It was some considerable time since he’d had one.

He cleared his throat and started shooting.

“The basic principle is balance.  Yu can’t demand any more of the person you’re talking to than you are prepared to give of yourself.  Decision makers, persons in positions of power and careerists in general usually like to give the impression of possessing a little democratic polish—God only knows why, although it goes down well with the media, of course.  They like to give the impression that they are conducting a reasoned two-way discussion or conversation, call it what you like, when what they are really doing is giving orders.  It seems to give them a mysterious feeling of satisfaction; old Nazi bigwigs used to like carrying on in a similar fashion.  A mild, understanding, paternal tone of voice as they sent people off to the execution squads; don’t take it personally, but…”
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

It was not a new sensation, just an example of or a variation on that old deterministic principle, presumably: the unavoidable business of patterns and preordained order in the environment.  Of increasing or decreasing entropy.

No, those thoughts about the arbitrary nature of life that he had flirted with the other day were something he now felt no enthusiasm for.

If there really was a creator or a force—or at the very least an all-seeing eye—it must be able to look down from its elevated position and make out the lines, the veins and arteries in time and space.  The structures that seem so incomprehensible from our usual worm’s-eye view.

And the mutual connections and consequences of actions.  Was there any other possibility?  This must be what constituted the categories of a god.

These patterns.

But if there was no higher force—did it really make much difference?

What about Anselm and the proof of God’s existence?  Hadn’t he always had trouble seeing the point of it?

He fumbled in his breast pocket for a toothpick, then remembered the state of affairs and lit a cigarette instead.

Wouldn’t the pattern exist even so, in the same way as DNA spirals and the crystals making up snowflakes have always existed, irrespective of whether there has been anyone or anything to observe them?

What does a fractal care about a camera? He asked himself.
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

It was clear that he was facing a person who inspired and demanded respect beyond the norm.  The familiar feeling of deference came creeping up on him, the king he sometimes felt when confronted by deeply religious and serene individuals—people who had worked out the answer to questions he himself had barely been able to formulate.  A deference that was just as naturally complemented by its opposite, contempt and loathing, when he met the opposite type: submissive and loudly braying sheep, dominated by the herd instinct, the sanctimonious fellow travelers of hypocrisy.
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

“The truth can be a heavy burden to bear,” he said.  “It seems impossible to bear it alone in the long run.  It would be good enough, though, if people could learn not to pass it on any old way.”
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

Münster left the bar, and as he crossed the street on the way to his car, he found himself feeling sorry for the chief inspeactor again.  That was the second time in a short period—only a month or so—so perhaps there was some truth in what people say:
    The older they get, the more human they seems to appear.  Mind you, there were talking about mountain gorillas, weren’t they?
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

“I daren’t analyze it,” he said.  “Certain things will not tolerate introspection.  That kills them off.”
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

Light unborn
Lines unknown
The Law as yet unwritten
In the darkness the child
In the dancing shadows the rhythms
From the rules of Chaos for the handling of heartache
And a little categorical imperative
—Håkan Nesser, The Return

Some cities are just dirty.  Others are more than dirty, they are unclean in a spiritual way.  Jana was convinced Kiev was now one of the latter, the cracked, grimy buildings sinking deeper into a dreadful swamp that was rising up to engulf every part of it.  And its inhabitants were warped people, shuffling through the grubby streets, becoming more and more like the ruins they trudged through.
—Michael Genelin, Siren of the Waters

He stood up, taking keys out of his pants, then pulling all of his pockets out, the linings hanging like limp white tongues.
—Michael Genelin, Siren of the Waters

He was surprised to see her first name on the tag -- it should have been as private as her hair or the shape of her body -- and it made her seem defiant. . . . He blushed again and turned away from her, trying not to turn completely but just enough to indicate that he wouldn't look at her. The woman's shoulders dropped slightly, which seemed to indicate that she'd noticed Nayir's discomfort and was disappointed by it.
—Zoë Ferraris, Finding Nouf

“…I hadn’t thought it at first, but that’s the way it is with the things that surprise you — you are convinced not because someone tells you to be convinced, you’re convinced because you discovered it yourself.”
—Zoë Ferraris, Finding Nouf

Qazi, of course, would have had no idea.  Did he buy the clothes thinking that all women liked pink?  Or was that what he wanted: a woman who belonged in it?  Katya thought of her own trousseau.  Othman was still putting it together, but she hoped he would avoid this order of clothing, tantalizing items whose only functional purpose was to symbolize what the wearer would never be.
—Zoë Ferraris, Finding Nouf

Omar Yussef saw that Khadija was about to cry.  He knew that he was shouting now and leaning very close to the girl across the desk, but he didn’t care.  He was infuriated by the ignorance of an entire generation and saw it concentrated in this girl’s thin shoulders and blank face.
—Matt Beynon Rees, The Collaborator of Bethlehem

“It’s politically correct these days to blow yourself up in a crowd of civilians.  It’s politically correct to praise those who detonate themselves and to laud them in the newspapers and in the mosques.”  Omar Yussef banged the edge of his hand on the desk.  “But you say that it’s outrageous for me to encourage intellectual inquiry?”
—Matt Beynon Rees, The Collaborator of Bethlehem

…When you realize that someone is gone and always gone, there is no longing for their return.  If death is simple and absolute, there is no doubt, no wondering whether the deceased received a good reward or was consigned to the flames—and doubt is a much more protracted torment than any kind of death.  When you can look at a headstone and think simply to yourself, “That lump of gray rock is what prevents the dust of my beloved blowing all over the cuffs of my pants, and that dust is all that there is left of him,” then you can truly live until you, too, die.
—Matt Beynon Rees, The Collaborator of Bethlehem

“That French fellow always made this young woman pose in positions of such extreme discomfort.  I think she must have felt the pose reflected some terrible pain within herself, or she would never have been able to let herself be used like this,” Omar Yussef said.
—Matt Beynon Rees, The Collaborator of Bethlehem

It occurred to hi that, with his first baby, Khaled Shukri would still be at the stage of laughing each time his child vomited.  A baby is happy after it spews up, smiling with a sense of relief.  Perhaps that out to be our natural, unconstrained reaction to the world around us, Omar Yussef thought.  We learn to restrain ourselves, because we are taught that there is something disgusting about vomit.  Imagine all the bile I should have heaved out that instead sat inside me, entering my bloodstream, carried to my brain and through my heart.  It’s becoming too much for my system.  I will have to heave, to cleanse myself of all the hate and frustration and disgust.  He thought of Shukri’s baby once more.  It would vomit and scream.  Both were genuine, wild, real.  Yes, he thought, it’s time for me to scream.
—Matt Beynon Rees, The Collaborator of Bethlehem

“I take it you drink beer?”
“Masses,” said Van Veetern.
—Håkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point

[Bausen] answered calmly and methodically the questions that were put to him, adopting a precisely judged degree of superiority that exposed and established the limited intellectual faculties of the questioner.  Always assuming he had any.
—Håkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point

“When do you think you will have the murderer under lock and key?” asked a red-nosed reporter from the local radio station.
“About ten minutes after we’ve found him,” said Bausen.
—Håkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point

There was no reason for him to expect anything but unpleasantness and ugly stuff.  It was one way of avoiding disappointment.
—Håkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point

In every investigation…there comes a point beyond which we don’t really need any more information.  When we reach that point, we already know enough to solve the case by means of nothing more than some decent thinking.  A good investigator should try to establish when that point has been reached, or rather, when it has been passed…it was precisely this ability, or the lack of it, which distinguished a good detective from a bad one.
—Håkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point

The world we live in is not a nice place—but we’ve been aware of that for quite some time, haven’t we?
—Håkan Nesser, Borkmann’s Point

L.A. is epidemically everywhere and discernible only in glimpses.
—James Ellroy, “James Ellroy Comes Home”

Cravitz was still not listening.  He was trying his best to crawl into those topaz bedrooms Miss Bang used for eyes.
—Emory Holmes, II, “Dangerous Days”

I didn’t know how it would go down, how I would feel watching the man I adored die.  It was like watching a part of myself die.  The part that was good and decent.  Well, good riddance.
—Jane Fitch, “The Method”

Theirs was old Beverly Hills money.  Old homey here meant BCTV—before color TV.
—Pat Morrisson, “Morocco Junction 90210”

Old BH hated the fact that the place’s original name was Morocco Junction; they thought it sounded like some cheesy hotel on the Vegas Strip, as indeed it did.  In the early 1960s, a Barbary Coast stripper—one of the new silicone types whose body wasn’t so much a temple as a major topographical feature—began billing herself as Beverly Hills.  Old BH passed the homburg at a Chamber of Commerce smoker and presented Ms. Hills…a nice little retirement fund, and a one-way ticket to Zurich so she could deposit it in person.  New Beverly Hills would have elected her mayor.
—Pat Morrisson, “Morocco Junction 90210”

The HMS Bounty was a time warp steak-and-booze emporium left over from the days of pounding down a couple of Scotches over lunch, when cholesterol sounded like the name of a new hair color line.
—Gary Phillips, “Roger Crumbler Considered His Shave”

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor.  It was a transient place.  People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare.  Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary.  Figuratively, literally, metaphorically — any way you want to look at it — everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed.  Just in case.
—Michael Connello, The Brass Verdict

“There’s nothing you can do about the past…Except keep it there.”
—Michael Connello, The Brass Verdict

In the early days of my second life I noticed how the shadow of a telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street – from 152 to the garden of 150 – over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening.  After watching this a few times I did the maths: the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had traveled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet.  We’d also travelled abut seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much much further as part of the wider spiraling of the galaxy.  And nobody noticed a thing.  There is no stillness, only change.  Yesterday’s here is not today’s here.  Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russian, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind.  We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in.  Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second.  Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back.  The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream.  It’s the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we’ve been forced to abandon.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Here’s the real game.  Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head.  It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me.  I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

The animal hunting you is a Ludovician.  It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect.  This may sound like madness, but it isn’t.  Life is tenacious and determined.  The streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge, experience and communication which have grown throughout our short history are now a vast, rich and bountiful environment.  Why should we expect these flows to be sterile?
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Caught there, caught in that second of realization and awareness, when everything came into quick focus and this thing, this event I’d stumbled into was all around me and instant and real, I wanted it to happen.  I wanted to let me knees buckle.  Let my shoulders slump, just let it all go – fall forwards, down, and finally, thankfully, out.  This monster river could take me away and unknot me and spread me out however it wanted and however it liked because, honestly, finally, I just felt so fucking tired of endless hours of doing my shitty best to cling my component parts together as a human being.  I wanted to pile up and slit-slide, wrap around the trunks of trees, a lost nothing of unthinking debris and high watermarks.  Just to be all the way empty, just be all the way gone.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

When I’d set up the Dictaphone loop at the edges of the room, the strange package was already inside the parameter.  And so, when the thick sinewy idea of a thing unlaced its long, slimy thought-body from the words and letters on the folded note and swam, slithered, up the bed towards me, there were no barriers to stop it.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

The something unwound itself carefully from the mucus and bile and slither-swam up into the air, coiling in loops around the vaporous remains of my thoughts and feelings of nausea.  It was small – maybe nine inches, maybe the length of a worry that doesn’t quite wake you in your sleep – a primitive conceptual fish.  I backed away slowly.  The creature had a round sucker-like mouth lined with dozens of sharp little doubts and inadequacies.  I could feel it just downstream from me in the events and happenings of the world, winding at the head height, holding itself in place with muscled steady swimming against the movement of time.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“This is a Luxophage,” Nobody said pleasantly, as if he hadn’t heard me, as if he were giving an informal talk.  “It’s one of a family of what you might all idea lampreys.  This particular species feeds by finding its way inside human beings and sucking on their ability to think quickly, to react.  They tend to make their hosts quiet, well behaved and firmly entrenched in whatever rut they happen to be in.  It’s a useful little parasite,” Nobody smiled, “although it does occasionally cause nausea.”
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

…already the dream was coming apart, its bright silk strands unwinding into nebulous emotions, little coloured clouds of feeling being dispersed by the movement of my waking-up mind.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“He wasn’t really a human being anymore, just the idea of one.  A concept wrapped in skin and chemicals…”
“A concept wrapped in skin and chemicals,” I repeated.  “That sounds like a human being to me.”
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“God, Eric, I’m sorry to say this but you’re so lucky.  You’re walking around in this constant state of collapse and you’re fine with that, I mean, you exist like that.  Some people, they might look like they’re in control day to day but if they let themselves go, maybe they’re going to all all the way apart and never put themselves back together.  You know?”
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Scout’s eyes were hot, bright, wet now.  It hit me that something vital was leaking out of her, something limited and tiny and which couldn’t be replaced.  I wanted to hold her and stop it from spilling out but I wanted her to suffer too, suffer for who she secretly was, suffer for her cruelty in making me feel a part of something, of making me feel warm, wanted and cared about, like I didn’t really have to be alone in this dead and empty world, all just for the same of some cold, logical plan.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

It isn’t just the past we remember, it’s the future too.  Fifty percent of memory is devoted not to what has already happened, but what will happen next.  Appointments, anniversaries, meetings, all the rolling engagements and plans, all the hopes and dreams and ambitions which make up any human life – we remember what we did and also what we will do.  Only the knife edge of the present is ‘hard’ to any degree.  Past and future are things of the mind, and a mind can be changed.
—Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Jamie was her…What was he?  Her lover—her younger lover—her boyfriend; the father of her child.  She was reluctant to use the word partner because it has associations of impermanence and business arrangements.  Jamie was most definitely not a business arrangement; he was her north, her south, to quite Auden, whom she had recently decided she would quote less frequently.  But even in the making of that resolution, she had found a line from Auden that seemed to express it all, and had given up on that ambition.  And why, she asked herself, should one not quote those who saw the world more clearly than one did oneself?
—Alexander McCall Smith, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world.  And if we lied about something, we disrupted, destabilized that essential truth; a lie was wrong simply because it was that which was not.  A lie was contra naturam.
—Alexander McCall Smith, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Isabel liked talking to people who knew their subject, and the fishmonger knew all about fish.  Many people in shops did not know what they were talking about, she thought.  They just sold things; the fishmonger, and people like him, believed in things.
—Alexander McCall Smith, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

…leave your conscience alone and it’ll leave you alone.
—Grace Brophy, A Deadly Paradise

I asked him directly if he’s my biological father and he said “No,” but he’s lying, the incestuous old bugger!  But I suppose you could say the same of me, as we’re still fucking on the long vacations, and I’m actually enjoying it.  Not quite like Christmas dinner together, but it does have a family feel.
—Grace Brophy, A Deadly Paradise

Everything in your life that seems so solid and permanent is really shifting underneath you without your noticing.
—Magdalen Nabb, The Innocent

I didn’t mind that love was blind.  But it shouldn’t also be stupid.
—Janice Kaplan, A Job to Kill For

Salander was dressed for the day in a black t-shirt with a picture on it of E.T. with fangs, and the words “I am also an alien.”  She had on a black skirt that was frayed at the hem, a worn-out black, mid-length leather jacket, river belt, heavy Doc Marten boots, and horizontally striped, green-and-red knew socks.  She had put on make-up in a colour scheme that indicated she might be colourblind.  In other words, she was exceptionally decked out.
—Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

And the feeling that washed over him was like the feeling you get when your new puppy pees in the house for the hundredth time.  Exhaustion in the face of how crap everything is.
—Åsa Larsson, The Black Path

There are advantages to hanging on to the same guy you’ve had from the start.  However wrinkly and saggy I get, he’ll still see the girl he got to know at the dawn of time.
—Åsa Larsson, The Black Path

He beat his forehead as if it get the coin to drop down into the machine and pay out.
—Åsa Larsson, The Black Path

And those memories you do have, thought Rebecka.  Do they really help?  It’s just a few pictures in an album in your head, after all.  In between those scenes you do remember there are hundreds, thousands, of scenes you’ve forgotten.  So are you remembering the truth?
—Åsa Larsson, The Black Path

All these people who want to shake his hand and talk to him, where do they all come from?  He’s making the maximum effort all the time.  In order to remain calm and friendly…He can feel that he needs a rest.  There are periods these days when he feels completely empty, it’s as if everyone he meets takes a little piece of him.
—Åsa Larsson, The Black Path

I haven’t the strength to be happy, she wants to say.  I can hardly even manage to be unhappy.
—Åsa Larsson, The Black Path

“…they want to receive something valuable without working for it.”
—Matt Beynon Rees, A Grave in Gaza

“A hellraiser in your younger days, were you, Abu Ramiz?”
“The hell was all on the inside,” Omar Yussef replied.
—Matt Beynon Rees, A Grave in Gaza

“I’m not ‘Mister Yussef.’  My family name is Sirhan.  Omar and Ussef are my first two names.”  He lifted a finger and pointed it at Cree, though he knew it would shake as he did so.  “You don’t even understand Arab names.  Yet you think you understand the duplicitous minds of men like al-Fara.”
—Matt Beynon Rees, A Grave in Gaza

“…A university professor is entitled to freedom of speech.  He must be allowed to question the institutions of the state, so that they are kept from corruption.  Academics can be expert watchdogs on behalf of the public.”
“You are from—what country?”
“Sweden.”
Al-Fara sucked on the cigarette, then blew his nose, loudly.  “Everything is peaceful in Sweden, so you can afford to have all these different rights.  If your country was threatened by a wicked occupation, you would see that these freedoms about which you talk would be less useful.  Later, when we have our state, we will have all these freedoms, of course.  The Palestinian people deserve them.”
“It’s the position of the UN that those freedoms are a prerequisite for the foundation of a true Palestinian state…”
—Matt Beynon Rees, A Grave in Gaza

People had invented many sciences, and most of them were of no benefit to the average man, but they carried on writing treatises, defending their master’s and doctoral dissertations, becoming members of academies.  Ever since he was very little, Momos had been able to sense with his very skin, his bones, his spleen that the most important branch of learning was not arithmetic or Latin but the ability to please.  That was the key with which it was possible to open any door.
—Boris Akunin, Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin

…Anita was not someone who considered a lack of response inimical to a conversation.
—Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

The students were moving a bit too fast, talking among themselves in low voices that quickly rose in volume, despite the teachers’ best efforts to enforce the no-talking rule.  Others were ignoring the guidelines for a Level II emergency, holding their cell phones low by their hips, text-messaging with the ferocity of young Helen Kellers who had just discovered an accessible language.  Alexa tapped on or two girls on the shoulder and shook her head in disapproval, but the girls just widened their eyes in fake innocence, as if they couldn’t imagine why they were being singled out.
—Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

Lenhardt made a pumping motion with his fist, one universally understood by men everywhere.  Or was it?  Did, say, Chinese peasants or aborigines in the outback do the same thing?  It was the kind of topic you never saw tackled on the Discovery Channel, but why not?  It could be interesting—the rituals of male bonding around the world.
—Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

Lenhardt had given his wife’s Methodist church a try, but he had never felt comfortable in the generous, light-filled space that Marcia had called a church…“Chuch” should be one of those tall, gloomy piles that made you feel guilty as soon as you were over the threshold.
—Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

“…Anyway, it seemed like the only time she ever put her phone down and stopped texting her friends was when we were in bed.”
“Well, yeah,” Lenhardt said.  “Everyone knows that’s nothing to call home about.”
—Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

“What beautiful irises,” she said.  Peter, used to compliments, thought for a moment that she was referencing his eyes.  Then he remembered the purple flowers that his mother had chosen.  So that’s what they were, irises.
—Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

…Maddy’s Mother Who Used to Work had looked as if she had a headache from the moment the party started.  Her forehead had four creases, like two equals signs, and there was a tiny set of parentheses at the bridge of her nose.  These seemed to get deeper and deeper as the day wore on, and by the time it was time to open the presents, her face looked like a very hard math problem, maybe even algebra.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

Maddy was the kind of girl who could make “That’s a pretty dress” or “I like your hair that way” sound more evil than anything heard in an R-rated movie.  IN school, she had a habit of saying, “Yes, sister,” so it sounded like a curse word.  Alice, who sometimes got in trouble for saying the right thing, had studied Maddy and tried to figure our how to get away with being so rude.  It had to do with getting your mouth and your eyes not matching, so one—the mouth—looked pretty and right, and the other—the eyes—had this hard glitter, but nothing extra.  No wink, no raised eyebrow.  Ronnie, on the other hand, did it backward.  Her eyes were always wide and confused-looking, while her mouth was twisted and sneering.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…Sharon loved that word: really.  Really, Alice, you have to trust me.  Really, Alice, this is for the best.  Really, Alice, I believe you.  But what did really really mean when Sharon said it?  Did it indicate that everything else Sharon said was fake?  Or was it supposed to show that what follwed was extra-real, really-real, super-size real?
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…Sharon cared about Alice, she announced often, a note of pride in her voice.  Sharon’s pride was what kept Alice from returning her affection.  Sharon could not think so well of herself for sticking by Alice unless sticking by Alice was a weird thing to do.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

“Maybe they killed him because he was their boss once.  Because he told them to clean out the fryer, and put those napkins out, and make sure the tables are wiped down.  Because he enforced the hair net rule.  They killed him…[b]ecause he cared, because he thought it mattered that the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 had clean bathrooms and fresh oil and low absenteeism.  The fast-food true believer met the West Side Existentialist Club, and the existentialists won.”
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…He had been caught off guard by his former boss’s bravery—and punished him for it…He had killed him to show the others the price of such valor.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

“The New Testament,” Lenhardt said, wagging his breadstick, “is the New Coke of religion.  They need to throw that sucker out and go back to the original recipe.”
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

What’s the big deal?  That’s what everyone said when they wanted special treatment.  What’s the big deal, what’s it to you?  The big deal, Ronnie wanted to tell them, was that rules were rules and you had to follow them, or else the world got crazy, and you went crazy with it.  She and her doctor had worked on this back at Shecter.  “You can sometimes break rules for a reason,” her doctor had said.  “But the reason can’t be ‘Because I feel like it.’  That’s what we call ethics, Ronnie.  In certain situations, ignoring a rule because you realize that following it would do harm is the ethical thing to do.  Everything else is just an excuse, a rationalization.”
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…it wasn’t the cement basin that bothered Alice, it was seeing Ronnie use it.  The very neatness, the orderliness of this act was disorienting.  It was natural for Ronnie to smoke.  But once her break was over, she should have flicked her butt into the air in a careless arc and let it fall where it may.  Ronnie was the kind of girl who littered, dropping candy wrappers and soda cans in the gutter.  At least she had been.  Ronnie was the bad one.  There shouldn’t be any confusion about this, even now.  Especially now.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…the two women sitting in the lobby were Helen Manning, who looked different in her street clothes, and a hulking, almost obese woman in a pink T-shirt and brightly printed stretch pants that were being forced to live up to their name.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

Clarice shook her head.  She was a black woman living in Baltimore.  She knew a lot of people who were in trouble and hadn’t done anything.  She also knew people who were in trouble and had done something, but maybe not the something for which they were in trouble.  And she knew people who were in trouble and had done the very thing of which they were accused, but still had good reason to lie about it.  They said confession was good for the soul, and perhaps it was.  But it was hell on the body.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

Sometimes she felt as if it was these unsaid things, not the loss of Olivia, that weighed them down.  Other times she wondered if they had made a silent pact to sacrifice their marriage as a tribute to Olivia.  It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, for them to be happy again?  Sometimes, with Rosalind, she had an unguarded moment of happiness and it terrified her.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

If only Ronnie had more good lines, more words, better words, words that she could put together so people would understand her, know who she really was.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…She could say “I’m sorry” a million times over could go to adult prison for the rest of her life, become a nun, work her way up to manage the Bagel Barn, marry and have her own children.  She could do anything and everything, but she could not undo her past, despite the promises her doctor had made.  It was what she was, all she was, and all she would ever be.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

Forget and forgive, the old adages advised, although most people switched the order, put the forgiveness cart before the forgetting horse.  But if you were determined not to forget something, to remember a deed in all its stark horror, then you would have to be a saint to forgive it.  Cynthia had never aspired to sainthood.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing


…a more intuitive person would have picked up on the insincerity of the invitation and turned it down.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

…Once she got pregnant, she was going to be one of those women who just lost it, whose bodies gave in and never found their way back from the world of elastic waistbands.
—Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing

“Perhaps the explanation is quite different,” Rydberg suggested.  “Perhaps there are people in today’s society that feel so powerless they no longer partake in what we call democratic society.  Instead they devote themselves to rites.  If this is the case, our nation is in trouble.”
—Henning Mankell, The Death of the Photographer

“…I don’t get enough sleep these days.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.  I just can’t sleep.”
“What do you do then?”
“Just lie there and think about how dreadful you are.”
—Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Roseanna

It was as if she only had to let go a little, and the barriers would fall and madness would burst through.
—Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Locked Room

Like Logic cutting through the fog of Ignorance, thought I…
—Michael Gregorio, Critique of Criminal Reason

She was as joyous as someone who believes with all her heart that ignorance is a gift from God.
—Mehmet Murat Somer, The Prophet Murders

“Ayol, if eating grass was enough to lose weight cows would have perfect figures.”
—Mehmet Murat Somer, The Prophet Murders

…Instead of wrestling with the large, messy questions that have occupied previous centuries of ethicists, for example, one should examine the rules that govern words like “good” and “ought.”  My very first seminar, given by a prominent visitor from England whose fields, they told me, was metaphysics, was on adverbs.  The metaphysics of adverbs?  From Reality to…adverbs?
    It appeared I was to spend the rest of my philosophical life thinking about language.  For language is humanly manufactured and thus, presumably, thoroughly intelligible.  The questions it posed might be difficult but were not, in principle, unanswerable.  No more inexhaustible Reality to contend with and make us feel our human limitations.  No more dark, inaccessible regions lying beyond the reach of reason’s phallic thrusts.  Reality was but a creature formed from one of the intellect’s own ribs, from language.  We could take care of her, fill her up and leave her spent.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

…when the superiority differential becomes large enough, we stop envying and start adoring.
    Everyone loves a hero.  What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters.  And who matters is a function of what matters.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“…Somebody will say something and I’ll think, Now what the hell does that mean?  That doesn’t make any sense.  And then someone else will answer and his response is as incomprehensible as the first one’s statement.  And back and forth they go, intelligible ot one another, unintelligible to me…”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“…A lucky thing for me that it’s been decided the things I can see are important ones, so I turn out smart instead of stupid.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

Everyone makes allowances.  His excuse is his genius.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

And how is it given to a woman to dominate but through sex?  Through sex a woman gains control over a man’s body that he himself lacks; she can move him in ways he cannot move himself.  And she invades and takes over his consciousness, reducing it to a sense of its own embodiment (see Sartre).  Sex is essentially the same game for men and for women, but for women, most of whom are otherwise powerless, it assumes a life-filling significance.  La femme fatale, la belle dame sans merci, is an otherwise impotent person who has perfected her one strength to an unusual degree.
    I have always loved in terms of power.  Does this mean I’ve never loved?  Does one love only if one loves for the right reasons?  Are there right reasons?
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

…We are our bodies, we die with our bodies.  That had been my metaphysical position.  And anyway, the prospect of survival had never much appealed to me on an emotional level.  I don’t much relish the thought of everlasting consciousness.  At very black moments I could always comfort myself with the ever present possibility of self-annihilation.  But there’s no escape if we’re immortal.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“That’s one of the compensations for being mediocre.  One doesn’t have to worry about becoming mediocre”.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“…It’s not that I have such respect for the empirical sciences, but to call psychoanalysis a scientific theory is absurdly high praise.  Freud’s ideas are completely ridiculous, unverified and unverifiable nonsense.  The whole thing’s got a built-in mechanism for discounting all counterevidence…He makes up some story that might be true, but then again probably isn’t.  If the patient accepts it, it’s verified.  What a genius.  But if the patient rejects it, that’s just because he’s still repressing the truth.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

…When I thought of Noam as The Genius, then of course I was only too happy to wait on him hand and foot, to pick up the dirty socks he thought nothing  of kicking off in the middle of the living room, or jump up from the dinner table when he announced he wanted a glass of water.  But then, in the course of our day-to-day living, I would sometimes just think of him as my husband Noam; and then I would feel the resentment curdle.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“A theory with illogical consequences is not true, cannot be true.  If anything counts accounts a theory, it’s that.”
“What makes logic so absolute?  Physical facts come first.  Logic has to conform to them.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“…Where do these necessary truths come from?  I understand where physical truths come from, from physical reality.  But where the hell do your necessary truths come from?  Plato’s heaven? In den schönen Regionen, wo die reinen Formen wohnen?”
“You’re thinking of it all wrong,” Noam answered.  “Logic doesn’t derive from the way the world is.  It determines the way the world has to be.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“You Platonists all suffer from Plato’s weakness.  As soon as you get to the heart of the matter, you lapse into metaphor.  Can’t you say anything clearly?  It’s misticism, spelled with an i.”
“I prefer a vague but vaguely true view to one that is clear and clearly false.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

Both of them have the same impersonal attitude toward ideas, whether their own or others’.  It’s the validity that matters, not the person incidentally attached.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

…Blind terror seized me.  I had, from the beginning, feared that he’d penetrate to my essential confusion, that he’d make the simple deduction from stupid statements to stupid thinking, and from thinking stupid to being stupid.  In short, to my secret: My intelligence, like my beauty, has always been overpraised, misperceived.  The conjunction favors both conjuncts.  I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brain for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy…
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“But the way you did it, Noam!  Did you have to be so cruel, so relentless?  Did you have to mortify him?”
“I assure you, Steve was not mortified.  You don’t understand these things.  Steve was interested in the objective value of his ideas.  He’s not going to be bothered by the trivialities that concern you so much.”
“Trivialities like human feelings?”
“Yes…You know, Renee,” he finally said, “you are an essentially trivial woman.  You have a lovely face and body, but in essence you are very trivial.”
I felt as if I had flunked my final exam, my very final exam.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

Frigidity we call it in women, impotence in men.  The terms reflect, I think, the male point of view.  But there’s coldness and want of power on both sides.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“Logic is the ladder of pure reason, but alas; the ladder’s a mere cobweb, and we fall down on our ass.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

…I was afraid of that knowledge which would be too knowing, that intimacy which would be too intimate, soft skin against soft skin.  With men there’s never the danger of getting too close.  They’re too essentially different.  They don’t know what we feel, we don’t know what they feel, and nobody’s mental privacy is seriously threatened.
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

“…It’s not as if I used to be like the others, only with something extra added.  So that you could take away that extra and there would be a person like others.  That extra was my whole being, my substance.  It didn’t leave room for anything else.  But that was okay.  If I was less of a person, it was only because I was more of a person…”
—Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel

In late February, sitting with his students at Hunter, Nordstrom found himself thinking of a poem he’d written in memory of the Zen master Soen Nakagawa, who often spoke of the endless dimension of universal life. In the poem, Nordstrom claimed it was the universal life that he loved, too. He could avow no love for the life of his mother or his father, and precious little for himself either, but he was Buddha incarnate when it came to the universal life. The pathos of it suddenly struck him. It seemed unspeakably sad that he had deceived himself into believing he loved the universal life for itself alone when in fact he loved it for lack of anything better.

What he wanted now was to love the life he had been given. In an e-mail message he framed it in the most primal terms: “This abandoned life of mine is like the abandoned boy, and I am the mother I never had who returns to claim that life and embrace it. It is a source of great pathos to reflect that without the therapy experience I might have died without having been reunited with my life! And in that sense, without having truly lived.” He was not sad, he said. Nor in any way disenchanted with the way of Zen. What could be more Zen than to restore the relish of the particular life? What he felt was joy. Not the unbordered joy of enlightenment, but the vernal joy that comes after the wintry work of mourning: the joy of a man with a life of his own.

            —Chip Brown, “Enlightenment Therapy”

…no disease is so fatal to an adequate understanding of life as overrefinement…

            —Paul Davis, “Reading and Writing”

And his notes stopped there…There was nothing to indicate that he knew the end was nigh, nothing in his notes paving the way for what was soon to happen.  A life, she thought.  My death could look the same, my diary, if I had kept one, would be unfinished.  Come to that, whoever does manage to conclude his or her story, to write a final period before lying down and dying?

            —Henning Mankell, The Man From Beijing

That was one of the most disheartening moments of my deeply unsatisfying life.

            —Walter Mosely, The Long Fall

You don’t have to be smart to be tough-minded.  As a matter of fact, the combination of stupidity and silence might be the greatest weapon in the history of our species.

            —Walter Mosely, The Long Fall

“Why do you want to be in here alone?”

“I guess that’s it: I want to be alone,” he said, staring at the perfectly aliged spines of the books on his shelves.

“But we all want to be alone,” she said.

            —Natsuo Kirino, Out

“…Knowing that it was real does not good, because the joy was in having it.”

            —Matthew Beynon Rees, The Fourth Assassin

“…That’s what infuriates me.  I live here among people who’d condemn me for the things in my life that’ve been worthwhile.”

            —Matthew Beynon Rees, The Fourth Assassin

“No animal would seek its own death.  An animal doesn’t expect to elevate itself by dying.  It’s our civilization that leads down the disgusting course to the suicidal assassin.  Our search for meanings higher than mere existence, life after death…”

            —Matthew Beynon Rees, The Fourth Assassin

Here is the evidence of human existence, a splitting binbag next to two damp boxes, I cannot find a name them.  They hardly show that I have lived.  And the dust it settles on these things, displays my age again, like a new skin made from old skin that has barely been lived in.  I didn’t need these things, I didn’t need them, pointless artefacts from a mediocre past, so I shed my clothes, I shed my flesh, down to the bone and burned the rest.  I didn’t need these things, I didn’t need them, took them all to bits, turned them outside in, and I left them on the floor, and ran for dear life through the door.  The useless objects, the gathered storm of shit, a dim and silent shedful of your life’s supplies.  When all you need’s a coffin and your Sunday best, to smarten up the end.  And at the front gate what reward awaits?  One bite of loaf of a holy ghost, an eternity of suffering the company of all those Christian men.  I didn’t need these things, I didn’t need them, pointless artefacts from a mediocre past, so I shed my clothes, I shed my flesh, down to the bone and burned the rest.  I didn’t need these things, I didn’t need them, took them all to bits, turned them outside in, and I left them on the floor, and ran for dear life through the door.  I’ll never need these things, I’ll never need them, it’s just you I need, you my human heat, for these things are only things, and nothing brings me like you bring me.  I’ll never need them, never going back, so let’s drop the past, and we’ll leave it on the floor, and run for dear life through the door.

            —Frightened Rabbit, “Things”