1. ... it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house ... in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship.… Read full post »

Three quotes from “The diary of a madman and other stories” by Nikolai Gogol (stories written between 1835 and 1842):

1. Like every self-respecting Russian tradesman, Ivan Yakovlevich was a terrible drunkard.

2. We shouldn't, of course, waste too many words on the tailor… Read full post »

Three quotes from the dystopian novella “Anthem” by Ayn Rand (1946 edition):

1. It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.… Read full post »

Here are five books I recommend for February of 2010, in alphabetical order by title. If you have a teen in your life, consider getting him or her one of the first two as a gift. (Come to think of it, consider any of these for that purpose, except for the… Read full post »

Three quotes from Stephen King's first novel, "Carrie" (1974):

1. Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.

2. "This isn't over," Chris Hargensen said, unzipping her skirt with a rough jab and reaching for… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Fifty-one tales", a fantasy short-story collection by Lord Dunsany (1915):

1. Wandering once by night from a factory city I came to the edge of Hell.

2. I said: "We feared you were dead. We feared you were dead." And he answered… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The hunger games", a 2008 dystopian / sci-fi novel for teens by Suzanne Collins:

1. He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me. I catch it in my mouth and break the delicate skin with my teeth. The sweet tartness explodes across my… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Copper sun", a historical-fiction novel for teens by Sharon M. Draper (2006) (Note: This book won the 2007 American Library Association Coretta Scott King Award):

1. "Fresh from Africa," the auctioneer told the crowd. "Mold 'em into what you want 'em to be. Look at… Read full post »

Three quotes from the 1953 sci-fi/fantasy novel "More than human" by Theodore Sturgeon:

1. A dazzle of bird notes stitched through the green.

2. [The fried eggs] were perfect, the whites completely firm, the yolks unbroken, liquid, faintly filmed over. There was bacon, four brief… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The most beautiful woman in town and other stories", a 1967 collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski:

1. Sarah began counting my calories. She took away my fried foods, bread and potatoes, salad dressing, but I kept my beer. I had to show her… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The illustrated man", a 1951 science-fiction short-story collection by Ray Bradbury:

1. At a distance the storm walked off on blue bolts of lightning and was gone.

2. Dad was always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him,… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The captain's death bed and other essays" by Virginia Woolf (essays written between 1923 and 1940 inclusive):

1. Fifty or sixty aeroplanes were collected in the [huge] shed like a flock of grasshoppers. The grasshopper has the same enormous thighs, the same little boatshap… Read full post »

Three quotes from "New horizons in the study of language and mind" by Noam Chomsky (2000):

1. The Martian scientist might reasonably conclude that there is a single human language, with differences only at the margins.

2. Suppose the library has two copies of Tolstoy's… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Red harvest", a 1929 detective/noir novel starring The Continental Op; written by Dashiell Hammett:

1. "So you're still alive," she said. "I suppose nothing can be done about it."

2. [Max] had been a good guy, straight as ace-deuce-trey-four-five, till he got… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Demon and other tales," a 1991 collection of horror-genre short stories by Joyce Carol Oates:

1. "[You hear] two sirens, coils of sound like mad red ribbons, rushing and twining together from opposite directions…."

2. "My plumbing in this dump, there's some… Read full post »

1. I know that some people think it must be very entertaining to walk around on an airless, low-gravity planet in space suits. Well, it isn't.

2. Thoughout the mile-long cylinder that… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Slaughterhouse-Five", a 1969 satirical novel by Kurt Vonnegut:

1. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.

2. Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living.… Read full post »

For the past few weeks I’ve been reading several books per week and posting quotes here on my OS blog. I recently read an excellent post from undertow, entitled What I read this fall, 2009, and I decided to copy what she did. So I think that at the end of… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Dracula", an 1897 novel of Gothic horror by Bram Stoker:

1. Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this.

2. This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning… Read full post »

Three quotes from "A Christmas carol", the 1843 novella by Charles Dickens:

1. Old Marley was dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The scarlet letter", a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850): 

1. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.

2. But, at that instant, [Hester Prynne] beheld old Roger Chi… Read full post »

Three quotes from the 1982 novel "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" by Anne Tyler:

1. The driver switched stations and Barbra Streisand came on, showing off as usual.

2. Courting [Pearl], [Beck] brought chocolates and flowers and then--more serious--pamphlets describing the products of [his employ… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Spunk: The selected stories of Zora Neale Hurston", an anthology of short stories written by Hurston between 1924 and 1942:

1. Now there are certain things that Grandma Potts felt no one of this female persuasion should do--one was to sit with the knees separated, "settin' brazen"… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The Prophet", a 1923 book of poem-essays on various topics, by Kahlil Gibran:

1. From "On love": When love beckons to you, follow him, / Though his ways are hard and steep. / And when his wings enfold you yield to him, / Though the sword hidden among… Read full post »

Three quotes from Edgar Allen Poe's only novel, "The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838):

1. [My] narrative … will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity,… Read full post »