revolutionary road

"At first glance, all the upper floors of the Knox Building looked alike. Each was a big open room, ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. The upper panels of these dividers, waist to shoulder, were made of thick unframed plate glass that was slightly corrugated to achieve a blue-white semi-transparency; and the overall effect of this, to a man getting off the elevator and looking out across the room, was that of the wide indoor lake in which swimmers far and near were moving, some making steady headway, some treading water, others seen in the act of breaking to the surface or going under, and many submerged, their faces loosened into wavering pink blurs as they drowned at their desks."
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"The trouble, he guessed, was mainly that she talked too much. It was also that so much of her talk rang false, that so many of its possibilities for charm were blocked and buried under the stylized ceremony of its cuteness."
--Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

"There are certain rights that are not to be subject to popular votes, otherwise they are not fundamental rights. If every fundamental liberty can be stripped away by a majority vote, then it's not a fundamental liberty."
--California State Attorney General Jerry Brown

your own personal hero

"Everyone's a hero in their own way, in their own not that heroic way."
--Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
--Cyril Connolly

looking past

"All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing."
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" ... what I am a proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character—mine and others'. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what's said and gone before, and forgive it."
--Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

half slumber

"Half-slumber took him. [They] turned out the lights and all was quiet and then a succession of images came forward, resurrected by some crow-eyed part of his mind that would neither wake nor sleep. Fragmentary emotions possessed and released him, drawn like garments from a wardrobe and discarded, one after another. Below that chaos of image and memory, something so powerfully suppressed he would barely remember it: the idea that everything once true in the world was now past, and a thousand new possibilities had been loosed."
--David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

immersed in creation

"Fiction specifically is an organic whole and allows you to immerse yourself and your mind in another mind's vision. The reading experience is quite intense, really, and to my mind, not well understood or even much talked about. Directed dreaming while awake is one shorthand, but that leaves out the language component, that is, most of the picture. Many think language is what makes us human; reading therefore makes us more human, more intensely ourselves. Reading is a creative experience for the reader, and fiction involves the most intense creative process on the part of the reader. That creative process is what energizes my love of reading and fiction in particular."
--Rick Kleffel, NPR Correspondent

stupid is as stupid does

"You're not stupid. You're just in Congress."
--Gust L. Avrakotos character in Charlie Wilson's War

"Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying about whether he'd hurt someone's feelings. But then he was a genius."
--Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

sunbeams

"You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive."
--James Baldwin
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"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly."
--Andrew Harvey

soul mirror

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it."
--Elizabeth Gilbert, quoting Richard from Texas, in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia

you know who

"I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe."
--Richard Gere

what's wrong with america

What is wrong in a country when during a historic primary election, every major American TV network is reporting on the latest Britney Spears breakdown, and the only place where you can find out what's going on in New Hampshire is BBC World News on PBS? What is the matter with us?