Become Quotes (page 88)
Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats.
Edward Abbey
Why do you read then?'
Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. ...
W. Somerset Maugham
I try to believe everything I read in the newspapers, but I had difficulty with last week's account of the London vagrant who was found, after death, to be carrying 1,500 in small change in his socks. My reason for doubting the story is that I, too, like to carry small change in my socks, but I have found that with more that 15 or 20 worth it becomes impossible to walk.
Auberon Waugh
..people do need some commandment to rule over them in our century, when god's ten have been virtually forgotten! the whole moral structure of our time rests on the eleventh commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining a power undreamed of by a hemingway or an orwell.
Milan Kundera
...having only learned to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies--my only talent--smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle...
Walker Percy