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I know what you're going to ask me," Spike said.  "And the answer is yes."

-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Booked: A Sunny Randall Novel

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Skye and Henry stood on a corner of Union Square on a fading San Francisco afternoon in early June, the occasional odor of popcorn swirling through, trying to busk up a few dollars.  Skye saw the devil go by in his black '85 T-top, crooked smile, ponytail, twisty little braids in his beard.  His skinny blond girlfriend sat beside him, tats running across her bare shoulders like grapevines, front teeth filed to tiny sharp points.  Skye turned away, a chill running down her back.

-John Sanford, Gathering Prey

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     Most years it was Phoebe Chadwick who got the ball rolling, usually in late January, when the weather was at its gloomiest and the streetlamp outside the window of her Bloomsbury office burned for days on end without a break.  Phoebe was a senior project coordinator for a respected but perpetually underfunded international relief organization.  Her work, while rewarding, left her forever short of financial resources herself.  Her three closest friends all had piles of money.  Sophie Maxwell worked for a Magic Circle law firm, and Ella Burns did something dubious in the City.  Beautiful Alice Winter got her money the old-fashioned way.  Alice had married it.

-Daniel Silva, Ransom

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I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name.  I didn't have to.  The building was already called "the barber shop".  That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long.  Port William had little written history.  Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light.  It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever.  After I had been there a while, the shop began to be called Jayber Crow's, or just Jayber's.  "Well, I'm going down to Jayber's," people would say, as if it had been clearly marked on some map, though it was so only in their minds.  I never had a telephone, so I was not even in the book.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself

thanks Michael

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      Selfmade men always do a lopsided job of it, and the sheriff had come out conspicuously short on the capacity to sympathize with anyone but himself.  No doubt ears still were burning at the Fort Peck end of the telephone connection; he'd had to tell that overgrown sap of an undersheriff he didn't give a good goddamn what the night foreman said about dangerous, get the thing fished out of the river if it meant using every last piece of equipment at the dam site.  This was what he was up against all the time, the sheriff commiserated with himself during the drive from Glascow now, toward dawn.  People never behaving on bit better than they could get away with.

-Ivan Doig, Bucking the Sun

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All times are mad, but some are madder than others.  The grueling work of people of conscience is to portray through their words and actions a less mad reality—to show the route toward a better land that, admittedly, cannot be reached but that can be approached if enough of the oarsmen can be encouraged to pull in the same direction.

     I did not expect to live in a peculiarly mad era, or to be caught up myself in the maelstrom.  On the contrary, the lot of my generation seemed likely to be one of ironic detachment, banality, and order, the passions euthanized for the good of the species.  But here we are.  And here I am, working to crawl out of the clutches of the sea and up to the prow, hoping to become one of those pointing out the course, away from this and toward something else.

-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith:  How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies

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Go back in time.  Examine the babe when still in its mother's arms.  See the external world reflected for the first time in the still-dark mirror of his intelligence.  Contemplate the first models to make an impression on him.  Listen to the words that first awaken his dormant powers of thought.  Take note, finally, of the first battles he is obliged to fight.  Only then will you understand where the prejudices, habits, and passions that will dominate his life come from.  In a manner of speaking, the whole man already lies swaddled in his cradle.

Alexis de Tocqueville made these observations in Democracy in America to explain his rationale for studying America's "point of departure."  Of course, the beginning is also where the biographer must start.  For the young Tocqueville, that external world was dominated by figures from the highest miliary and administrative nobility of the Ancien Regime, survivors of the Revolutionary Terror, loyal to the exiled Bourbons, and dead set against the liberal views Tocqueville himself would eventually embrace.  Presaging this divergence, Tocqueville displayed considerable independence of mind at an early age, and he repeatedly flouted expectations.  At the same time, he developed the habit of casting doubt on much of what he did and saw.

-Oliver Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

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Let me begin my story with a few words about my family.  They were all plan Missouri farmers, proud, honest, hardworking and poor.  Desperately poor.

     According to family legend, my Bradley ancestors immigrated from the British Isles sometime in the mid-1700s to Madison County, Kentucky.  In the early 1800s they migrated west to what would become the State of Missouri.  They settled on small, hard farm parcels in Randolph County in the central part of the state near Clark, a farm village, and Higbee a coal-mining town.

     My grandfather, Thomas Minter Bradley, still in his teens, served as a private in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.  When he came home, he married Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the daughter of a poor Clark farmer.  They had nine children.  My father, John Smith Bradley, born February 17,1867, was the oldest.

     Like all the Missouri Bradley's, my father began life as a sodbuster.  But he became the first Bradley to break out of the mold.  At age nineteen, and until then largely self-educated, he entered one of the rural schools near Clark.  He was a quick study.  Two years later he had advanced far enough to qualify as a teacher in the rural school system and about 1888 he launched his life's work.

     My father was a curious blend of frontiersman, sportsman, farmer, and intellectual.  Powerfully built and fearless, he was a superb hunter and shot—indisputably the best in Randolph County.  A pioneer in baseball, he carved his own bats, taught himself to pitch curve balls and organized and starred on local teams.  In the months when school was not in session, he usually hired out to farmers or sharecropped to earn enough money to survive.  At the same time, he was an omnivorous reader and lover of books.  Everywhere he taught, he encouraged his students to read and created small libraries for them.

-Omar N. Bradley (with Clay Blair), A General's Life:  An Autobiography by General of The Army Omar N. Bradley

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     I'm walking on Revere Beach outside of Boston where the low tide has pushed the ocean far away from the shore, and the wet sand is squishing between my toes.  I came here for no particular reason—just to clear my head after two frantic weeks in the city surrounded by noise, construction, and crowds.  A briny, sweet smell hangs over everything in the thick humidity of September.  Warm air and wafts of cool breeze intermingle—it is T-shirt and jacket weather both at the same time.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

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Bystanders have no history of their own.  They are on the stage but are not part of the action.  They are not even audience.  The fortunes of the play and of every actor in it depend on the audience whereas the reaction of the bystander has not effect except on himself.  But standing in the wings—much like the fireman in the theater—the bystander sees things neither actor or audience notices.  Above all, he sees differently from the way actors or audience see.  Bystanders reflect—and reflection is a prism rather than a mirror; it refracts.

-Peter F. Drucker, from the Prologue to Adventures of a Bystander: Memoirs

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I taught religion once, many years ago, and I greatly enjoyed it.  But I never had much use for theology.  There are, I am told, some thirty-five thousand different species of flies.  But if the theologians had their way, there would only be one, the right Fly.  The Creator glories in diversity.  And no species is more diverse than those two-legged creatures, Men and Women.  Even as a small child I marvelled at their diversity.  And I have never met a single uninteresting person.  No matter how conformist, how conventional, or how dull, people become fascinating the moment they talk of the things they do, know, or are interested in.  Everyone then becomes an individual.  The most conventional person I can recall, a banker in a small New England town, who seemed to know nothing but the most hackneyed clichés, became fascinating when he suddenly started talking about buttons throughout the ages—their invention, their shapes, their materials, their functions and uses—with a fire and passion worthy of a great lyrical poet.  The subject did not interest me much; the man did.  He has become an individual.

-Peter F. Drucker, from the Preface to the New Edition, Adventures of a Bystander: Memoirs

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     The first time I set eyes on Vincent I was standing in the snow next to my father, trembling under the authority of a loaded shotgun.  I remember that it had been a perfect night for poaching.  January cold and windless.  A full moon had whitewashed the thin layer of fog that lingered above the feeder creeks.  Above the sky was clear; below, the ground hard.  Deer had moved down from the forest to glean the wheat fields on Count Robert de Costebelle's estate.   Buyers in Paris waited in the wings, ready to pay cash for a carcass in good condition.

     I recall my father cursing and I remember wanting to hit him for being old and hardheaded and most of all for getting us caught.  A small gnarly terrier scurried between my feet, uprooting pockets of snow in a fit of agitation.  Vincent stood next to his uncle, Serge Lebuison, gamekeeper of Merlecourt.  The year was 1958.  I was eighteen years old.

-Guy De La Valdène, Red Stag

thanks Rob

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I've always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.

     A prescriptionist at heart, I've always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.  I've always believed that art emulates life, not the other way around.

     I've been finding that tougher to do lately.

-Matthew McConaughey, Poems & Prayers

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When I was a child, I wanted to live in a pine forest.  Or, to be more accurate, a pine plantation.  We have a lot of these in Britain, sown across the hills and mountains during the twentieth century for cheap paper and pulp.  The tight ranks of conifer trees, planted so close together that most of their branches die for lack of light, and which acidify the soil for miles around, are hated by ecologists, landscape lovers and most of the local wildlife, which barely ventures into them.  Perhaps that's what I liked about them.  There seemed to be some kind of dark, mossy mystery in the maze of pillarlike trunks.  Maybe I'd been reading too much Tolkien (this was a perennial problem), but I could imagine myself pitching camp in there, making a small tent of branches and leaves, wandering the soft forest floor, drinking from streams, becoming something other than myself. 

-Paul Kingsnorth, from his Introduction to Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

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The worst smell in the world is dead badger.  He'd encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odour without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel.  Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of noxious causes he didn't know.  As it turned out, he couldn't do anything about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die, and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it.  Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the later to the test, Max opted for a third way; he'd walk a different route for a while, and see if one of the local farmers shifted it in the meantime.  Which was why he wasn't sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.

-Mick Herron, The Secret Hours

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The straight-backed wooden chairs in Dottoressa Saviano's anteroom were instruments of torture.  Chiara, try as she might, could find no arrangement of her limbs that provided even a moment of comfort.  At present she sat with the erect carriage of a dancer, with her hands folded atop her knees and her feet together on the scuffed wooden floor.  The dottoressa's secretary had cast several admiring glances at Chiarra's stylish pumps—and at her stylish husband as well.  She was used to women staring at Gabriel; he was still impossible handsome.  He also happened to be one of the world's finest art conservators, which conferred upon him an unwelcome local celebrity.  Chiara managed the restoration company that employed him.  For better or worse, they were among the most prominent couples in Venice.

-Daniel Silva, An Inside Job

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     I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me.   She was small and blond, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory.  "Aren't you Nick Charles?" she asked.

-Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

Will be reading this book carefully.......

 

Whether you are in your twenties, or your nineties, or anywhere in between, a high-performance brain that is protected from degeneration is your most important possession—especially if it comes with a life-time guarantee.  Until very recently, that has simply not been feasible.  But times have changed—dramatically—and in this book I'll show you how to keep your brain youthful for a very long lifetime.

-Dale E. Bredesen, The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime

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     A cold day in December.  Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man's grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease.  He was concerned about the weather, that the old man not be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of the freezing newspapermen, that he not have to wait for a cab.  Instead he had guided his guest to his own car and driver.  The older man would remember the young man's good manners almost as clearly as the substance of their talk, though it was an important meeting.

-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest

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Brunetti found that counting silently to four and then again and again allowed him to block out most other thoughts.  It did not obscure his sight, but it was a day rich with the grace and favour of springtime, so as long as he kept his eyes raised about the heads of the people around him, he could study the tops of the cypress trees, even the cloud-dappled sky, and what he saw he liked.  Off in the distance, if only he turned his head a little, he could see the inside of the brick wall and know that beyond it was the tower of San Marco.  The counting was a sort of mental contraction, akin to the way he tightened his shoulders in cold weather in the hope that, by decreasing the area exposed to the cold, he would suffer it less.  Thus, here, exposing less of his mind to what was going on around him might diminish the pain.

-Donna Leon, The Girl of His Dreams: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery