I grew up in comfortable circumstances, a darling of privilege and genteel luxury.
Take this wisdom to heart, and it will make all the difference.
Dougie MacKenzie, Mango Lassie
The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card.
I didn’t bother to notice the color of his shadow.
Ross Thomas, Cast a Yellow Shadow
I began to think about this book during the first week of January 1950.
He is my firstborn son, and I am very proud of him.
Stephen Gould, Questioning the Millennium
I woke up one morning to find that the entire city had been covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating jam.
I turned and jogged away, his angry swearing lost among the clamor behind me.
Yahtzee Croshaw, Jam
This morning Rino telephoned.
It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
We have reached a crossroads in our history.
We need to enter into it, pen in hand, and set about redrawing it entirely.
Simon Reid-Henry, The Political Origins of Inequality
I moved to New York not long after my mother killed my father, or was it my father who murdered my mother?
That’s very well, she said, but we must all cultivate our own gardens.
Jarett Kobek, The Future Won’t Be Long
In 1524 the Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazano and the crew of the French caravel Dauphiné were the first known Europeans to sight Lenapehoking (“land of the Lenape”).
Kwëlaha apchìch wèmi awèn mwëshalawoo yuk Lënapeyok (“let us hope that the Lenape will be remembered forever”).
Herbert Kraft, The Lenape
England in April.
Read them again.
Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
I had expected Birana to weep.
Perhaps we will join them on that shore at last.
Pamela Sargent, The Shore of Women
The novice does not ordinarily get high the first time he smokes marihuana, and several attempts are usually necessary to induce this state.
This suggests that behavior of any kind might fruitfully be studied developmentally, in terms of changes in meanings and concepts, their organization and reorganization, and the way they channel behavior, making some acts possible while excluding others.
Howard Becker, Becoming a Marihuana User
This is how I heard the story.
He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer toward his story’s end or maybe, if that great eschatologist Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun turned out to be right, toward the story on the opposite shore that was waiting to begin.
Michael Chabon, Moonglow
The Civil War began in the chilly morning hours of April 12, 1861, when a Confederate battery opened fire on Fort Sumter.
We had best take care that, like Lincoln, they are worthy of our trust.
Daniel Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution
In 1873, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court filed a memorable dissenting opinion.
The master concern of democracy in America is not business but humanity; and the problem of social control should be judged with that truth in mind.
Robert McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise
At the beginning of his autobiograhy, Poetry and Truth, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes his difficult birth in 1749 but, perhaps ironically, also mentions its fortunate consequences for the town at large.
He is the great example of how far you can go when you accept the lifelong task of becoming who you are.
Rüdiger Safranski, Goethe
Bloody shambles this last six years.
I think there’s going to be another war.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
This book presents the T programming language, which is a dialect of the LISP programming language.
The Orbit compiler for T provides additional optimization techniques that result in efficient code.
Stephen Slade, The T Programming Language
From the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the First Wold War, the railroad was a central, if not the major, element in the political, economic, and social development of the United States.
The goal of these efforts was not progressivism interpreted in the traditional sense, as historians have commonly interpreted that term, but a political capitalism which solved the internal problems of an industry and protected it from the attacks of a potentially democratic society.
Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation 1877–1916
In every culture we know of, whether it be secular or religious, ethically diverse or not, the question of how to live is central.
A good man delights in receiving advice: all the worst men are the most impatient of guidance.
Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic
Good evening!
Good night, everyone.
David Grossman, A Horse Walks into a Bar
Swept forward by waves of popular passion, democracy has buried all alternatives to become the world’s governing ideal.
If the obstacles to a culture of democracy are perennial, because if self-interest never meshes smoothly with the ideal of reciprocity, then the consequences of civil wars have deepened, and made even more urgent, the need to confront the persistence of struggles thought buried in the past.
James Kloppenberg, Towards Democracy
In Haiti, the language of print, school and the media is French, but when speaking outside of formal settings, people use another form of speech: Haitian Creole.
This book has been my brick in the wall.
John McWhorter, Talking Back, Talking Black
My mother was convinced I’d die young.
And just like that, we were back in business.
Jason Rekulak, The Impossible Fortress
Early morning, December 16, 2008, with a drizzle of freezing rain falling, few would even glance at the line of inconspicuous Mercury Marquis sedans pulling up to Washington, DC’s Fairmont Hotel.
That only exists in fairy tales, dreams, and the Fed’s econometric models.
Danielle Booth, Fed Up
Karen Kipple had always been an early riser.
Except Karen could never get him out of her head.
Lucinda Rosenfeld, Class
How did the Marquis de Lafayette win over the stingiest, crankiest tax protesters in the history of the world?
“Lafayette,” she said, “we are here!”
Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
On our wedding-day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.
thomas havens
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
A man stands at the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods—a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials.
An Englishman builds a machine in guttering lamplight, a Yankee engineer awakens in medieval fields, a jaded Pennsylvania weatherman relives a single February day, a little cake summons lost time, a magic amulet transports schoolchildren to golden Babylon, torn wallpaper reveals a timely message, a boy in a DeLorean seeks his parents, a woman on a pier awaits her lover—all these, our muses, our guides, in the unending now.
James Gleick, Time Travel
I didn’t know what email was until I got to college.
I hadn’t learned anything at all.
Elif Batuman, The Idiot
Seventeen-year-old Ewan Mao waited outside the great hall of the man he was destined to kill, wondering if his best friend was still alive.
“Yeah, all right.”
Erin Claiborne, A Hero at the End of the World
The twentieth century was dominated, in Europe, by the conflict between totalitarian regimes and liberal democracies.
Of one thing, however, I am sure: I would not like any ministry or its officials to decide on my behalf what I should be, think, believe or love.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians
Even on a good day I don’t enjoy being shot at.
“But I really don’t think I’m cut out for this job anymore….”
Zoë Sharp, Die Easy
The suntanned man behind the front desk glanced up, recognized him, and looked back down without a word.
It sounded just a little better than all right.
John Altman, Deception
I was born in Antwerp in 1939, one year before the Germans occupied Belgium in World War II.
I know that some questions will never be answered, but having found the strangers I was looking for, I can now start putting them to rest.
Dori Katz, Looking For Strangers
“Segregation,” the preacher paused to let his congregation absorb the full solemnity of his message, “is apparent everywhere.”
The ability to do just that—and thus completely reorient the dramas of urban politics—provides the only true measure of a world ready to forswear the splitting of its cities.
Carl Nightingale, Segregation
2018 • 2016
This page last modified on 2017 October 9.