Green Reader
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John Daniel – A Word in Favor of Rootlessness
“I worry, for one thing, that we will settle in place so pervasively that no unsettled places will remain.”
Thomas J. Lyon – A Taxonomy of Nature Writing
“Often [wilderness accounts are] framed on the great mythic pattern of departure, initiation, and return, and always the account gains meaning from the basic American circumstance that wilderness, where the traveler and adventurer usually go, has always in our history been considered a realm apart.”
J.D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey
“‘I know this much, is all,’ Franny said. ‘If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything’.”
Katherine Rundell – The Girl Savage
“It was odd that the men on the farm spoke of her as beautiful, because she was not, or not really. The skin on her forehead was often spotty, and her teeth were not straight, and her features were too large for her face. Moreover, as if unable to walk slowly through a life so tremendously exciting, she ran everywhere and as a result was always bruised and scarred. Scarred, they said, but never scared. She was destined for great adventures.”
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five
“She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence: ‘How did I get so old?'”
Jay McInerney – Bright Lights, Big City
“You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.”
Enid Blyton – Five on a Treasure Island
“Out they all went into the sunshine. They felt very important and serious. It was marvelous to be looking for lost ingots of gold.”
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