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Mark Twain – Luck
“‘He is just as good and sweet and lovable and unpretending as a man can be, but he doesn’t know to come in when it rains. Now that is absolutely true. He is the supremest ass in the universe; and until half an hour ago nobody knew it but himself and me’.”
Natalie Babbit – Tuck Everlasting
“The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the centre of the earth?”
Arthur Miller – All My Sons
“CHRIS: They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other. I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today. And I got an idea- watching them go down. Everything was being desroyed, see, but it seemed to me that one new thing was being made. A kind of- responsibility. Man for man. You understand me?- To show that, to bring that on to the earth again like some kind of monument and everyone would feel it standing there, behind him, and it would make a difference to him. (Pause). And then I came home and it was incredible. I- there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a- bus accident.”
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
“Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food, and possibly from this accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it.”
Ernest Hemingway – A man of the World
“Blindy said, ‘I got to be careful on those roads.’ ‘What you mean those roads?’ somebody asked him. ‘You only go on one road. Between here and The Flats.’ ‘I been on lots of roads,’ Blindy said. ‘And any time I may have to take off and go on more’.”
Eleanor Catton – The Rehearsal
“Stanley wondered whether he had done anything in his life that required redemption. He felt ashamed that nothing came to mind. He wished he had a secret, a dark blooming ink-stain of a secret that he could brood over and shrug away.”
Gregg Mitman – Reel Nature
“Longing for the authentic, nostalgic for an innocent past, we are drawn to the spectacle of wildlife untainted by human intervention and will.”
Carson McCullers – Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland
“Mr. Brook looked into the fire, and the face of Madame Zilensky was in his mind- a severe face, with dark, weary eyes and delicately disciplined mouth. He was conscious of a warmth in his chest, and a feeling of pity, protectiveness, and dreadful understanding. For a while he was in a state of lovely confusion.”
Irwin Shaw – The Girls in their Summer Dresses
“‘Let’s not see anybody all day,’ she said. ‘Let’s just hang around with each other. You and me. We’re always up to the neck with people, drinking their scotch, or drinking our scotch; we only see each other in bed. I want to go out with my husband all day long. I want him to talk only to me and listen only to me’.”
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Lost World
“The immense view before us, which carried us half-way back to the affluent of the Amazon, helped us to remember that we really were upon this earth in the twentieth century, and had not by some magic been conveyed to some raw planet in its earliest and wildest state. How difficult it was to realize that the violet line upon the far horizon was well advanced to that great river upon which huge steamers ran, and folk talked of the small affairs of life, while we, marooned among the creatures of a bygone age, could but gaze towards it and yearn for all that it meant!”
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