“I got a golden handshake that nearly broke my arm I left the ranks of shuffling graveyard people I got rust upon my hands from the padlocked factory gates Silent chimneys provide the silent steeples”

“And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.”

“People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.”

“It is simple; when I got here I noticed the orange juice was on the right side of the table which lead me to believe that this bitch is left handed. Since tomorrow is Thursday and school buses are yellow… I knew I had to make a sandwich. Then I screamed the number 4 silently in my head for an hour; that’s when shit got real. Since birds are afraid of Asian people... the lady got killed when she murdered herself, obviously.”

“Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.”

“The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT." Richard Bausch”

“..those soul-satisfying feelings quickly capture our attention, and we no longer wish to pay attention to physical clues. Instead, our focus is on the immense satisfaction the feelings are providing.”