"Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached."

Just because you made it warm doesn't make it yours. A lesson for felines.
Feline Posits: What if one makes it warm for a long time?
A Response: I will still put it on the towel rack, because it is still a towel.

June was the kind of woman who not only talked to her cats, but consulted them seriously about world affairs and life changes. Mr. Pickles, she would say in that adorable voice women reserve for their cats and when they want a large favor performed. [...] Mr. Pickles, what is your opinion of the recent World Bank shake-up? The cat would look up at her, thinking for one wild moment that the tendrils of hair around her face were lizard tails.

One day, everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: you chose waffles and I chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle.

"Never trust folks," Olive's mother told her years ago, after someone left a basket of cow flaps by their front door. Henry got irritated by that way of thinking. But Henry was pretty irritating himself, with his steadfast way of remaining naive, as though life were just what a Sears catalogue told you it was: everyone standing around smiling.

She said: "You're the one who can't stand these Hail-Mary Catholics! Your mother taught you that! Pauline was the only real Christian in the world, as far as Pauline was concerned. And her good boy, Henry."

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did. But […] it was never enough, was it?

In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world. I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true.

A lot of people her age expected to live forever and saw life as a kind of birthright to endless good times. I never did see things that way, and I knew that she hadn't either.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession--they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

Men like Gato made you feel that your manhood was being tested. There was nothing about his life--the hard time he did, the drug use, the manslaughter--that you envied, and yet when he flashed that arrogant grin, it was as if he dismissed everything you had done in your life as being sissy, joto. It tempted you to take some foolish risk just to prove him wrong, to show him you were one the boys.

I've been meaning to tell you about her," he said, shaking his head, as if she were a weather pattern that had blown into his life, a phenomenon over which he had no control. Something that had just happened.

EM was an adrenaline-driven field--the difference between cocaine and adrenaline a matter of a few carbon atoms.

I began my ministry with some zeal, endeavouring to improve the lives of my flock by launching a little campaign to have the alehouse open only three days in the week instead of seven, and offering--as a nobler recompense--two extra church services. Sadly this little initiative was answered, in certain quarters, with something like hostility.

When chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble, give a whistle. And always look on the bright side of death.

And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home to write a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs,�� ‘buts,�� and ‘on the other hands.�� If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.

But religion, our guest insisted with impressive confidence, allows you to ask only so many questions before you get to: Just because.

You have to have faith. Well, I said. Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person’s problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren’t empirically verifiable.

The whole point of faith is that irreducible answers don’t bother the faithful. The faithful take comfort and even pride in the knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own, as difficult as that is to do. Everyone—irreligious people included—relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.

Perhaps you're a reader who'll have better luck.
In contrast to me, you won't find yourself stuck
When plotlines confuse you and run all amok,
And all you can think is to ask WTF??

Jay was a Vermont kid, raised in a small town, and there was a mordant New England pluck in the way he gazed into the abyss and said, "I see what you're trying to do there, abyss."

Colin had a fascinatingly odd way of maintaining intense eye contact while simultaneously all but squirming with agony over the fact that he was being noticed--the way, say, your fifteen-year-old goth cousin might do. This was something I noticed time and again in the inhabitants of remote Alaska, this total, helpless acuteness in the presence of a stranger. It was as if isolation had kept them from numbing themselves to the fact of other people.

I met Dick Newton [...]. He introduced himself to me in the dining hall. "Introduced" is a strong word. He walked up to me and said, "Well, who are you?" Not in an unfriendly way. Just in a way that said he was eighty-two and still handled deep Alaska wilderness on a daily basis and maybe shouldn't have to smile extra just because he met some kid who knew how to order pizza with an app.

[...] the aliens start talking to the crowd. What they say is--I'm paraphrasing--"bzzzzrrg bzzzzoom ppozz bzrg pzow." Imagine Donald Duck trying to mimic a dial-up modem; it's like that.

One of the reasons J. K. Rowling's books exerted magnetic power over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about political inclusiveness. You get to keep the scarves, the medieval dining hall, the verdant lawns, the sense of privilege (you're a wizard, Harry), while not only losing the snobbery and racism but actually casting them as the villains of the series.

I no longer even cared whether my paintings were accurate or right in the way that the Surgeon & his Linnaean books of scientifick description wished paintings of fish to be accurate or right. I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything. But because I could not paint everything, because I could only paint fish & my love & because I could not even do that very well, you may not think it much of a story.

I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn’t stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & flesh’s appetite & flesh’s union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself.

Mark: A child who, out of pity, always picked the worst players for his team. An adult who called only when weepy drunk.

The bathroom was a science-fair project in full bloom.

Nothing had the power to hurt her except for what power she gave it. Every barrier she'd ever chafed against was no more than a Chinese finger lock that opened the instant when she stopped pulling.

That's the thing about dogs. There isn't a human being in the world worthy of any dog's welcome.

She reddened again. Her skin was instant litmus.

Mark marveled at Weber's professional patter. "Man! If I could talk like you, I'd be getting laid on a daily basis." He launched into imitative psychobabble, almost convincing enough to earn him a comfortable wage somewhere on the West Coast.

The two of them ended up at a restaurant back in Kearney, one of those chains drawn up in Minneapolis or Atlanta and faxed around the nation.

Karin called Bonnie... She got the infectious answering machine -- I wish I was here to talk to you for real -- in that cheerful treble that sounded like the horn of a Ford Focus on mood elevators.

My brain, all those split parts, trying to convince each other. Dozens of lost Scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night. Where's me?

» not one to speak her mind if it could be construed as poor manners to do so

» a careful student of appearances

» innately suspicious of change

» friends with a woman who liked arts and books, but could never seem to follow through with her own self-improvements (Spanish lessons curtailed after chapter 1, her short-lived political awareness campaign yielded the way to Mr. Bridge’s pronouncements, and books were often abandoned)

» progressively less successful imparting her old values to the new generation of Bridges

What if?

"I suppose," he wrote, "that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime."

Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.

Are you reading this copy of Little Victories as “an actual hardcover book, with printed pages, by candlelight, in a hayloft, above sleeping livestock, as people used to do in the 1990s?��

My house, by contrast, feels as if a tribe of orangutans has gotten loose and opened up a case of Heinekens.

My brother, whose daughter is on the verge of her teens, treats me like I'm still in the first season of Breaking Bad. Wait until Season 4, he says, when it takes your kid two hours to dress before school.

[…] if you hand a child a phone in a public setting, people look at you like you’ve just given your kid a sack of enriched uranium. You are lazy, you are ceding parenthood to the machines, you are not actively building organic fun. The parenting magazines and blogs tell you to set limits, and this is useful advice, but I am not setting limits on, say, an airplane. If it means a peaceful cross-country flight without dirty stares from every other passenger, I will let a two-year-old watch Scarface.

Quality of writing = 0.88
Creativity in structuring = 0.93
Depth of probes into character = 0.48
Exploration of themes = 0.85
Achievement versus expectations = 0.27

Rating = 0.88 + 0.93 + 0.48 + 0.85 + 0.27 = 3.41

Cumulative suffering given war = Σ Misery[i, t | war] (summed across all individuals i, and future episodes t)

Cumulative suffering given no war = Σ Misery[i, t | no war] (summed across all individuals i, and future episodes t)

Power ^ Empathy = Greatness

Actions and Attitudes = function(Genetics, Brain chemistry, Upbringing, Outside influences like friends or books, Physical needs) + Residual

Remaining interest = Original interest * (0.5 ^ # of equations)

[…]when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice [from the one in power] could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

Monkey got to play, fish got to swim;
Man got to risk his life to some psycho’s whim.
Monkey got to doze, fish got to coast;
Man got to rest assured he won’t become a ghost.

W., as usual, is reading about God. God and mathematics, that's all he's interested in. Somehow everything has to do with God, in whom W.'s not capable of believing, and mathematics, which W. is not capable of doing. And he's reading about God and mathematics in German, W. says, which means he doesn't really understand what he doesn't understand.

They sit in lace-curtained parlors and tsk-tsk on an indrawn breath, they know every unwanted pregnancy in town sooner than the girl does, they want English teachers in Augustana College fired for assigning A Farewell to Arms, they wrote the Volstead Act.

I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbitt, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to. One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation.

[...] I felt an uneasy adolescent peeking from behind my old-age make-up, as if I were a sixteen-year-old playing Uncle Vanya in the high school play [...]

"We've come this far."
At this Carl snorted.
"What? Sully said.
"Nothing," Carl said. "I was just thinking about Napoleon invading Russia."
Both Sully and Raymer blinked at this.
"Also the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Vietnam War," Carl continued. "Not one of those clusterf*cks could truly commence until somebody said, What the hell. We've come this far."