“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”
-Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
“In the long days of fall they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. They sat in groups and watched the rain fall over the deserted fairgrounds. Pools of mud and dark sawdust and wet trodden papers. The painted canvas funhouse walls and the stark skeletons of amusement rides against a gray and barren sky.
A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child’s eyes watched by flarelight sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. To make you ache with want.”
-Sutree by Cormac McCarthy
”Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
“‘Father,’ he asked, ‘are the rich people stronger than anyone else on Earth?’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I said. ‘there are no people on Earth stronger than the rich.’ ‘Father,’ he said. ‘I will get rich, I will become an officer and conquer everybody. The Tsar will reward me, I will come back here and then no one will dare…’ Then he was silent and his lips still kept trembling. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘what a horrid town this is.” -Dostoevski The Brothers Karamazov
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“‘Father,’ he asked, ‘are the rich people stronger than anyone else on Earth?’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I said. ‘there are no people on Earth stronger than the rich.’ ‘Father,’ he said. ‘I will get rich, I will become an officer and conquer everybody. The Tsar will reward me, I will come back here and then no one will dare…’ Then he was silent and his lips still kept trembling. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘what a horrid town this is.”
-Dostoevski The Brothers Karamazov
“The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and clusters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time — time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.”
-This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
