To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us life and disperse- the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This is at least one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.
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Richard Adams, Watership Down
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Creatures that have neither class nor books are alive to all manner of knowledge about time and the weather; and about direction, too, as we know from their extraordinary migratory and homing journeys.
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Richard Adams, Watership Down
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Rabbits, of course, have no idea of precise time or of punctuality. In this respect they are much the same as primitive people, who often take several days over assembling for some purpose and then several more to get started. Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin.
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Richard Adams, Watership Down
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…death is like that: people are alive until they die.
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Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle
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Of course you hate getting angry! You don’t like anything unpleasant, do you? You’re a slitherer-outer, that’s what you are! You slither away from anything you don’t like!
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Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle
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Joy has that peculiar effect that at times it oppresses us just as much as grief.
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Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
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…I am not proud, but I am in love, and I believe love is more apt to make one blind that pride is.
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Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
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People will pay for a supply of “pure” news, a source for “safe” information and entertainment. The way milk and meat and blood are inspected, imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption.
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Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
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We’re like Tom Hanks in ‘Big’. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
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Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
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I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.
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Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
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Almost every place has a moment of the day, an angle and intensity of light, in which it looks its best. When you’re stuck someplace, you learn that time and you look forward to it.
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Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
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Inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain and is often misread as shallowness and indifference.
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Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
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Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ‘cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.
- Alexander Supertramp May 1992
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Jon Krakauer, Into The Wild
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No matter how much pain or grief the heart and mind might bear, the stomach always has demands, quite independent, of its own.
If you cannot recall something immediately, it probably is not worth remembering.
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John Gardner, GoldenEye
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