Times Quotes (page 351)
The bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able to both lie and to trust other people at the same time.
David Foster Wallace
The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits, and wages rising, it may be thought that this practice would cease; but as I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted, That those eat now who never ate before; And those who always ate, now eat the more.
Thomas de Quincey
Kennedy entered, waving to the standing audience, an elderly gentleman in an Alpine hat and lederhosen struck up “Hail to the Chief ” on an accordion bigger than he was. The president did a double take, then lifted both hands in an amiable holy shit gesture. For the first time I saw him as I had come to see Oswald—as an actual man. In the double take and the gesture that followed it, I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.
Stephen King
A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowingso much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yetmore afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to seehow beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them--and whatpeople hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at themwith admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. Tome they are beautiful terrors.
George MacDonald
Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the cast iron-works of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.
Charles Dickens