Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mad-houses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and the tempest, the riot and confusion within: -- when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day.

My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk

As I stare at people's faces, I realize that many of them believe they're innocent because they haven't yet had the opportunity to snuff out a life. It's hard to believe that most men are more moral or better than me simply on account of some minor twist of fate.

The Last Coyote, Michael Connelly

I passed through L.A. on my way back home and I saw those mountains going all the way up from the sea to the sky ... Damn, I ate dinner at the Derby my first night in town. I was going to blow my whole wallet and you know who saw me there in uniform and picked up the tab? Goddamn Clark Gable. I'm not kidding you. I kickin' fell in love with that place and it took me almost thirty years to see that.

Tempest-Tost, Robertson Davies

She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and otherworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

A Round-Heeled Woman, Jane Juska

At what age - I want to know - does one get to ignore everybody but oneself? How old do you have to be to be rude?

Points of Entry - Three Rivers, Mary Jane Jacob (editor)

Because mass culture moves so fast and is constantly in motion, it gives the appearance of promoting change, but its overwhelming effect is statis, arrived at by what Roland Barthes called "humiliated repetition": "always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning."

From an essay titled "Coming the Point at Three Rivers: Art/Public/Community, What Do Artists Want?" by David Levi Strauss

O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life, Thomas Wolfe

Great accomplishment is purchased only by the disruption of order; even with the highest spiritual energy, its expenditure must seek relief in subsequent and restorative lassitude.

Set This House on Fire, William Styron

It is with neither pride nor distress that I confess that ñ in the idiom of our time ñ I am something of a square. By profession I am a lawyer. I am ambitious enough to wish to succeed at my trade, but I am no go-getter, and, being constitutionally unable to scrabble and connive, I suspect that I shall remain at that decent, mediocre level of attainment common to all my ancestors, on both branches of the tree.

The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: A hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwards innocence people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relationships they compromise falsifyingly ñ through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. They singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet ñ when they do meet, their victims are strewn all around.

The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder

About learning assembly language: "'I could talk to God, just like IBM.'"

Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story

Edited by Francis Ford Coppola, Adrienne Brodeur, Piggy and Tigre, two-fifths of the 141 st Street Bad Bengalis, are flat on their backs, sticky with sweat, stuck to the stoop like kicked-over colas.

From a story called "Scaring the Baddest Animal" by Chris Spain

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Down inside the computer are three lasers ñ a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry you frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.

In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.

By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of ZK pixels on a side, it be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.

So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse.

Otherwise Engaged, Suzanne Finnamore

I used to dream of being married to Michael, how ideal it would be. Both of us serenely independent yet madly in love, supporting our meteoric careers with a steady stream of great sex and European vacations. This is not going to happen, I realize, with a sudden weariness. We're going to be like everyone else, lucky to survive without one of us murdering the other, like the farmer in Oregon who killed his wife with a frozen squirrel.

The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley, Po Bronson

In this day and age, some of us are lucky enough to be free to make what we can of the world. We have independent will at our disposal, and we have the urgent moral responsibility to exercise that will, not to follow in the steps of those held up as gods. There are no higher stakes in life, no higher ambition. That is the true spirit of entrepreneurism.

A Son of the Circus, John Irving

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

Shardik, Richard Adams

Henceforth, in his mind, Melathys would be a woman whom he knew, and whatever front she might present to the world, he, like herself, would look through it from the inside, aware of much, if not all, that it concealed from others.

Dictionary of the Khazars, Milored Pavic

Imagine two men holding a captured puma on a rope. If they want to approach each other, the puma will attack, because the rope will slacken; only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope is the puma equidistant from the two of them. That is why it is so hard for him who reads and him who writes to reach each other: Between them lies a mutual thoughts captured on ropes that they pull in opposite directions.

The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed; it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire

It's the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.

The Drifters, James A. Michener

I do not love war, but I love the courage with which the average man faces up to war.

Voyeur, Alberto Moravia

But one's day-to-day existence with its repetitions and habits runs parallel to the drama which, when there is one (and there often is), seems totally devoid of any connection with that humdrum life.

Underworld, Don DeLillo

Coming home, landing at Sky Harbor, I used to wonder how people disperse so quickly from airports, any airport ñ how you are crowded into seats three across or five across and crowded in the aisle after touchdown when the captain turns off the seat belt sign and you get your belongings from the overhead and stand in the aisle waiting for the hatch to open and the crowd to shuffle forward, and there are more crowds when you exit the gate, people disembarking and others waiting for them and greater crowds in the baggage areas and the concourse, the crossover roars of echoing voices and flight announcements and revving engines and crowds moving through it all, people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments, the medicines and aspirins and lotions and powders and gels, so incredibly many people intersecting on some hot dry day at the edge of the desert, used underwear fistballed into their bags, and I wondered where they were going, and why, and who are they, and how do they all disperse so quickly and mysteriously, how does a vast crowd scatter and vanish in minutes, bags dragging on the shiny floors.

Seven Japanese Tales, Junichiro Tanizaki

We did belong to different species. I felt that the more he trusted me, with his frank, open attitude, the more the gulf between us deepened. The more friendly we tried to be, joking together in apparent intimacy, gossiping and laughing together, the more the distance between us increased. There was nothing I could do about it.

From "The Thief"

The Lords of Discipline, Pat Conroy

I am always writing revisionist histories of my mother.

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

The men of Earth came to Mars.

They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all.

The Fearful Void, Geoffrey Moorhouse

This merely exemplifies the calibre of the fear which every man carries with him, unless he is uncommonly wise or strong or lucky. It appears to us in a great many other forms, almost everyday of his life. We hesitate to speak to strangers for fear of a rebuff, a small humiliation. We are loath to use we fear that more may be taken from us than we really wish to give. We will not stand up and be counted in some small but important matter because it may cost us a security or, more frequently perhaps, an advancement. Gradually we become stultified, incapable of giving to each other, waiting instead for the next hostile move from another fearful man, which must be countered with all the craft at our disposal, for the sake of self-preservation.

The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark

There's a kind of insanity that comes from being between walls and under a roof. You're too cooped up, and don't get a chance to test ideas against the real size of things. That's true about day and night, too; night's like a room; it makes the little things in your head too important. A man's not clear-headed at night.