Defense of Reading and Writing

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Reading and Writing

They say write the book you want to read. When I first started writing fiction, with nothing but ideas and enthusiasm and an ignorance of the elements of storytelling, this is the book I would have wanted as my guide.

-Richie Billing, A Fantasy Writers' Handbook 

“We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.”

― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor

“He is like a superhero, practicing living a normal life before starting his career as a defender of libraries, books, and the all-important art of reading. When elections come, and the town realizes the threat it is facing, he will fight for what is good and right in the world, and protect us from disaster.”

― Alice Ozma, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared

“We are not quite novels.

We are not quite short stories.

In the end, we are collected works.”

― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Quotations

"It is a joy to find thoughts I might have beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than myself."

  -Marlene Dictrich

There are so many quotes

By So many people

Even long before Jesus walked the earth as man

And still today Even more people

From Everywhere are coming up with still more quotes

Will writing new quotes every end?

Are we trying to out quote one another? –

This was made to fit with your theme and not to be the best quote of all time. 

You’re not writing that down, are you? I’m just talking.

-Catholic Bard

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.”

― Winston S. Churchill

“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would

enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

― Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

“Don’t you ever get tired of quoting?” asked Dinah.

“No,” said Gage sitting up again. “Like a visit from Deputy

Herrera and Deputy Campbell, quoting reminds me there are people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts beside mine, and other ways of thinking.”

― Gregory Maguire, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy

 “[A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious

business." (The Record Lie)”

― A.A. Milne, If I May

Books (BioOptic Organized Knowledge Devise.)

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Books opened up a whole new world to me. Through them I discovered new ideas, traveled to new places, and met new people. Books helped me learn to understand other people and they taught me a lot about myself. ... Some books you never forget. Some characters become your friends for life.

-Judy Blume

WE LOVE BOOKS, and we bet you do, too. We especially love books that inspire, heal, and transform lives. We’ve all found that life becomes richer when we’re reading a great book. You go to sleep at night feeling that your time on Earth is more valuable, your experience here more worthwhile. You wake up seeing yourself, other people, and the world differently. This is real magic—

-Jack Canfield, You've GOT to Read This Book! 

 “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”

― Agatha Christie, The Clocks

“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”

― Paulo Coelho

“Think books aren't scary? Well, think about this: You can't spell "Book" without "Boo!”

― Stephen Colbert, I Am America

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”

― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.”

― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

I knew how to visit the creatures who would never be sighted in the zoos or the museum or the woods. They were waiting for me in books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty-six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner or exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me in the pages of books. – Neil Gaiman, Unnatural Creatures.

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”

― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.”

― Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”

― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.”

― Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

― Ernest Hemingway

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture

and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

 -Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption              

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”

― Astrid Lindgren

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.”

― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.”

― Chaim Potok, The Promise

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. ... I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”

― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“We biblioholics have different priorities. We've got all our clothes in our suitcase in two minutes flat, and then we spend three hours and fifty-eight minutes deciding which books to bring.”

― Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

“Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.”

― Fulton J. Sheen, Life is Worth Living

“It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.”

― Gary Soto

“When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”

― Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper

“A book, being a physical object, engenders a certain respect that zipping electrons cannot. Because you cannot turn a book off, because you have to hold it in your hands, because a book sits there, waiting for you, whether you think you want it or not, because of all these things, a book is a friend. It’s not just the content, but the physical being of a book that is there for you always and unconditionally.”

― Mo Willems

Book Buyers

It's proving difficult to gather an audience. It's not just that nearly everything on the Internet is free. It's that there is just so much stuff. If I want to learn how to set up a particular backpacking tent, I can find twenty videos that will show me how. If I want instruction on how to play a particular song on the ukulele, I can find fifty videos. If I want to learn about the Immaculate Conception, I can find well over a hundred videos. It's difficult for any one of those to stand out.

-Karl Keating

Substitute Books for Videos and the same principle applies.

Genre

“Our original idea was to write a book titled Fifty Shades of the Hunger Games, by J.K. Rowling with Stephen King: A John Grisham Novel.”

― Dave Barry, Lunatics

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.”

― Alan Moore

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone.

If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German,

you can look down on everyone.

If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books,

you can at least look down on mystery readers.

Mystery readers have sci-fi readers.

Sci-fi can look down on fantasy.

And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness.

 I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years,

 people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike.

Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction.

Shakespeare wrote popular fiction

—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist.

Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius.

The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”.

The Latin root simply means “letters”.

Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t.

For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics.

For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives.

Those connections happen because the books

successfully communicate something real about the human experience.

Sure, there are trashy books that do really well,

but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity.

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature

—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”

― Brent Weeks

Action/Adventure: 

An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work.

-Critic Don D'Ammassa, Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction,

“ It’s still a great time for adventurers. ”

― Tim Lebbon, Predator: Incursion

“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.'

I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit or There and Back Again

Modern Day Adventure: “Where do we go from here?”

Kippmann motioned Pitt into the car.

“Disneyland” he said solemnly, “to stop a double murder.”

-_-__--

Next to the cleverly engineered apparitions in the Disneyland Haunted House, The Pirates of the Caribbean is the most popular attraction in the world-famous park. Constructed on two underground levels that occupy nearly two acres, the quarter-of-a-mile boat ride carries awed passengers through a maze of tunnels and vast rooms decorated as roving pirate ships and pillaged seaside towns, manned by almost a hundred lifelike figures that not only match the best of Madam Tussaud’s, but who also sing, dance and loot.

Pitt moved to the center of the arched bridge over the canal and joined in the singing amid three merry buccaneers who sat with their legs dangling over the fake stone parapet, swirling their cutlasses around in circles in tune with the songfest. Pitt in his Big Bad Wolf suit and the frolicking pirates presented a strange sight to the people in the boat as they waved and sang the famous old seafaring ditty. The children, a girl about ten and a boy, Pitt guessed, no more than seven, soon recognized him as the three-dimensional cartoon character and began waving back.

Castile and De Croix also laughed and then saluted him in Spanish, pointing and joking to themselves while the tall bald assassin and his accomplice, the broad-shouldered brute, sat stony-faced, unmoved by the performance. It occurred to Pitt that he was on thin ice, on which not merely a false move, but the tiniest miscalculation of any detail could spell death to the men, woman and children who sat innocently enjoying his antics.

-Clive Cussler, Iceberg

Real Life Adventurer:

Almost any animal is dangerous when aroused. In 1926 I came close to being killed by a tapir, the meekest of animals. As I slapped that fistful of ointment over the tapir’s spine he started running. I followed as best I could, with my hand over his back like a bareback rider preparing to leap aboard his charger. Suddenly the animal whirled around, dropped back a few feet and charged straight at me, burying his head in my stomach and knocking the wind out of me as his six hundred pounds sent me sprawling on my back. I had hardly hit the ground when the Meekest of Animals jumped on me, his front feet bearing down on my chest, his hind feet on the ground.

-Frank Buck, Bring ’Em Back Alive: The Best of Frank Buck

I pulled the map from my back pocket. It was wet and crumpled, the lines I had traced to highlight my route now faded. I stared at my markings, hoping that they might lead me out of the Amazon, rather than deeper into it. The letter Z was still visible in the center of the map. Yet it seemed less like a signpost than like a taunt, another testament to my folly. I had always considered myself a disinterested reporter who did not get involved personally in his stories. While others often seemed to succumb to their mad dreams and obsessions, I tried to be the invisible witness. And I had convinced myself that that was why I had traveled more than ten thousand miles, from New York to London to the Xingu River, one of the longest tributaries of the Amazon, why I had spent months poring over hundreds of pages of Victorian diaries and letters, and why I had left behind my wife and one-year-old son and taken out an extra insurance policy on my life.

I told myself that I had come simply to record how generations of scientists and adventurers became fatally obsessed with solving what has often been described as “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”—the whereabouts of the lost City of Z. The ancient city, with its network of roads and bridges and temples, was believed to be hidden in the Amazon, the largest jungle in the world. In an age of airplanes and satellites, the area remains one of the last blank spaces on the map. For hundreds of years, it has haunted geographers, archaeologists, empire builders, treasure hunters, and philosophers. When Europeans first arrived in South America, around the turn of the sixteenth century, they were convinced that the jungle contained the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands died looking for it. In more recent times, many scientists have concluded that no complex civilization could have emerged in so hostile an environment, where the soil is agriculturally poor, mosquitoes carry lethal diseases, and predators lurk in the forest canopy.

-David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Classic Adventure:

Tarzan of the Apes needed no interpreter to translate the story of those distant shots. With Jane Porter's kisses still warm upon his lips he was swinging with incredible rapidity through the forest trees straight toward the village of Mbonga.

He was not interested in the location of the encounter, for he judged that that would soon be over. Those who were killed he could not aid, those who escaped would not need his assistance.

It was to those who had neither been killed or escaped that he hastened. And he knew that he would find them by the great post in the center of Mbonga village.

Many times had Tarzan seen Mbonga's raiding parties return from the northward with prisoners, and always were the same scenes enacted about that grim stake, beneath the flaring light of many fires.

He knew, too, that they seldom lost much time before consummating the fiendish purpose of their captures. He doubted that he would arrive in time to do more than avenge.

On he sped. Night had fallen and he traveled high along the upper terrace where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathway through the gently undulating branches of the tree tops.

In a few minutes more Tarzan swung into the trees above Mbonga's village. Ah, he was not quite too late! Or, was he? He could not tell. The figure at the stake was very still, yet the warriors were but pricking it.

― Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes

“It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.”

― Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

"No animal had a chance with me anymore. That is no boast; it is a mathematical certainty. The animal had nothing but his legs and his instinct. Instinct is no match for reason. When I thought of this it was a tragic moment for me, I can tell you."

Rainsford leaned across the table, absorbed in what his host was saying.

"It came to me as an inspiration what I must do," the general went on.

"And that was?"

The general smiled the quiet smile of one who has faced an obstacle and surmounted it with success. "I had to invent a new animal to hunt," he said.

"A new animal? You're joking."

"Not at all," said the general. "I never joke about hunting. I needed a new animal. I found one. So I bought this island built this house, and here I do my hunting. The island is perfect for my purposes--there are jungles with a maze of traits in them, hills, swamps--"

"But the animal, General Zaroff?"

"Oh," said the general, "it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. No other hunting compares with it for an instant. Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits."

Rainsford's bewilderment showed in his face.

"I wanted the ideal animal to hunt," explained the general. "So I said, `What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?' And the answer was, of course, `It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason."'

"But no animal can reason," objected Rainsford.

"My dear fellow," said the general, "there is one that can."

"But you can't mean--" gasped Rainsford.

"And why not?

― Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game

Nautical Adventure:

“We are motionless. The sea is polished. There is no sky but only a hot whiteness that descends like a curtain in every side, dropping, as it were, even below the horizon and so diminishing the circle of the ocean that is visible to us. The circle itself is of a light an luminescent blue. Now and then some sea creature will shatter the surface and the silence by leaping through it. Yet even when nothing leaps there is a constant shuddering, random twitches and vibrations of the surface, as if the water were not only the home and haunt of all sea creatures but the skin of a living thing, a creature vaster than Leviathan.”

― William Golding, Rites of Passage

NOT EVERY THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL IS ACCUSED OF MURDER, brought to trial, and found guilty. But I was just such a girl, and my story is worth relating even if it did happen years ago. Be warned, however, this is no Story of a Bad Boy, no What Katy Did. If strong ideas and action offend you, read no more. Find another companion to share your idle hours. For my part I intend to tell the truth as I lived it.

I was given a volume of blank pages—how typical of my father!—and instructed to keep a daily journal of my voyage across the ocean so that the writing of it should prove of educational value to me. Indeed, my father warned me that not only would he read the journal and comment upon it, but he would pay particular attention to spelling—not my strongest suit. Keeping that journal then is what enables me to relate now in perfect detail everything that transpired during that fateful voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1832.

-Avi, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

Spy Adventures: THERE ARE moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent. There are assignments on which he is required to act the part of a very rich man; occasions when he takes refuge in good living to efface the memory of danger and the shadow of death; and times when, as was now the case, he is a guest in the territory of an allied Secret Service.

― Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die 

 “He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.”

― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear. Well, that's me—Cammie the Chameleon. But I'm luckier than most because, at my school, that's considered cool.

I go to a school for spies.”

Of course, technically, the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women is a school for geniuses—not spies—and we’re free to pursue any career that befits our exceptional educations. But when a school tells you that, and then teaches you things like advanced encryption and fourteen different languages, it’s kind of like big tobacco telling kids not to smoke; so all of us Gallagher Girls know lip service when we hear it. Even my mom rolls her eyes but doesn’t correct me when I call it spy school, and she’s the headmistress. Of course, she’s also a retired CIA operative, and it was her idea for me to write this, my first Covert Operations Report, to summarize what happened last semester. She’s always telling us that the worst part of the spy life isn’t the danger—it’s the paperwork. After all, when you’re on a plane home from Istanbul with a nuclear warhead in a hatbox, the last thing you want to do is write a report about it. So that’s why I’m writing this—for the practice.

― Ally Carter, I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Swashbuckler Adventure

The word “swashbuckler” conjures up an indelible image: a hero who’s a bit of a rogue but has his own code of honor, an adventurer with laughter on his lips and a flashing sword in his hand. This larger-than-life figure is regularly declared passé, but the swashbuckler is too appealing to ever really die. Who wouldn’t want to face deadly danger with confidence and élan? Who can deny the thrill of clashing blades, hairbreadth escapes, and daring rescues, of facing vile treachery with dauntless courage and passionate devotion? Sign me up, please.

-Lawrence Ellsworth,   The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure: Classic Tales of Dashing Heroes, Dastardly Villains, and Daring Escapes  

What diabolical villainy you have performed here,” said Porthos, when the officer had rejoined his companions and the four friends found themselves alone.

“Well, I am in a maze,” said Porthos; “do YOU approve of what d’Artagnan has done?”

“PARBLEU! Indeed I do,” said Athos; “I not only approve of what he has done, but I congratulate him upon it.”

“And now, gentlemen,” said d’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all--that is our motto, is it not?”

“And yet--” said Porthos.

“Hold out your hand and swear!” cried Athos and Aramis at once.

Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by d’Artagnan:

“All for one, one for all.”

“That’s well! Now let us everyone retire to his own home,” said d’Artagnan, as if he had done nothing but command all his life; “and attention! For from this moment we are at feud with the cardinal.”― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

"Señor Zorro, eh?" Gonzales cried in a terrible voice.  "Is it my fate always to hear that name?  Señor Zorro, eh?  Mr. Fox, in other words!  He imagines, I take it, that he is as cunning as one.  By the saints, he raises as much stench!"

Gonzales gulped, turned to face them squarely, and continued his tirade. 

"He runs up and down the length of El Camino Real like a goat of the high hills!  He wears a mask, and he flashes a pretty blade, they tell me.  He uses the point of it to carve his hated letter 'Z' on the cheek of his foe!  Ha!  The Mark of Zorro they are calling it!  A pretty blade he has, in truth!  But I cannot swear as to the blade – I never have seen it.  He will not do me the honor of letting me see it!  Señor Zorro's depredations never occur in the vicinity of Sergeant Pedro Gonzales!  Perhaps this Señor Zorro can tell us the reason for that?  Ha!" He glared at the men before him, drew back his upper lip, and let the ends of his great black mustache bristle. 

Johnston McCulley, Mark of Zorro  

http://swashbucklingadventure.net/books/the-big-book-of-swashbuckling-adventure/

Animals

Non-Fictional Natural Animals: “Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.

― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

Non-Fictional Animal Stories: THEY DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back. I lay face down on the cobbled floor in a pool of nameless muck, my arm deep inside the straining cow, my feet scrabbling for a toe hold between the stones. I was stripped to the waist and the snow mingled with the dirt and the dried blood on my body. I could see nothing outside the circle of flickering light thrown by the smoky oil lamp which the farmer held over me. No, there wasn’t a word in the books about searching for your ropes and instruments in the shadows; about trying to keep clean in a half bucket of tepid water; about the cobbles digging into your chest. Nor about the slow numbing of the arms, the creeping paralysis of the muscles as the fingers tried to work against the cow’s powerful expulsive efforts. There was no mention anywhere of the gradual exhaustion, the feeling of futility and the little far-off voice of panic.

James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small 

Fictional Dogs : “Then suddenly there was a flash, and thunder pealed. Lassie hesitated and whined in a quick, querulous tone. She was frightened. It is little use to blame a dog for having fear. A dog has so many braveries that its few fears do not cancel them out. And truth to tell, there are few collies that can stand thunder and lightning.”

― Eric Knight, Lassie Come-Home

Fictional Horses: Well, my dear,” she said, “how do you like him?”

“He is exactly what John said,” he replied; “a pleasanter creature I never wish to mount. What shall we call him?”

“Would you like Ebony?” said she; “he is as black as ebony.”

“No, not Ebony.”

“Will you call him Blackbird, like your uncle's old horse?”

“No, he is far handsomer than old Blackbird ever was.”

“Yes,” she said, “he is really quite a beauty, and he has such a sweet, good-tempered face, and such a fine, intelligent eye—what do you say to calling him Black Beauty?”

“Black Beauty—why, yes, I think that is a very good name. If you like it shall be his name;” and so it was.

When John went into the stable he told James that master and mistress had chosen a good, sensible English name for me, that meant something; not like Marengo, or Pegasus, or Abdallah. They both laughed, and James said, “If it was not for bringing back the past, I should have named him Rob Roy, for I never saw two horses more alike.”

― Anna Sewell , Black Beauty

Animal Fantasy: "There—is—an—underground—passage," said the Badger, impressively, "that leads from the river-bank, quite near here, right up into the middle of Toad Hall."

"O, nonsense! Badger," said Toad, rather airily. "You've been listening to some of the yarns they spin in the public-houses about here. I know every inch of Toad Hall, inside and out. Nothing of the sort, I do assure you!"

"My young friend," said the Badger, with great severity, "your father, who was a worthy animal—a lot worthier than some others I know—was a particular friend of mine, and told me a great deal he wouldn't have dreamt   of telling you. He discovered that passage—he didn't make it, of course; that was done hundreds of years before he ever came to live there—and he repaired it and cleaned it out, because he thought it might come in useful some day, in case of trouble or danger; and he showed it to me. 'Don't let my son know about it,' he said. 'He's a good boy, but very light and volatile in character, and simply cannot hold his tongue. If he's ever in a real fix, and it would be of use to him, you may tell him about the secret passage; but not before.'"

The other animals looked hard at Toad to see how he would take it. Toad was inclined to be sulky at first; but he brightened up immediately, like the good fellow he was.

"Well, well," (Toad)  said; "perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am—my friends get round me—we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories—and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I've been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be. Never mind. Go on, Badger. How's this passage of yours going to help us?"

"I've found out a thing or two lately," continued the Badger. "I got Otter to disguise himself as a sweep and call at the back-door with brushes over his shoulder, asking for a job. There's going to be a big banquet to-morrow night. It's somebody's birthday—the Chief Weasel's, I believe—and all the weasels will be gathered together in the dining-hall, eating and drinking and laughing and carrying on, suspecting nothing. No guns, no swords, no sticks, no arms of any sort whatever!"

"But the sentinels will be posted as usual," remarked the Rat.

"Exactly," said the Badger; "that is my point. The weasels will trust entirely to their excellent sentinels. And that is where the passage comes in. That very useful tunnel leads right up under the butler's pantry, next to the dining-hall!"

"Aha! that squeaky board in the butler's pantry!" said Toad. "Now I understand it!"

"We shall creep out quietly into the butler's pantry—" cried the Mole.

"—with our pistols and swords and sticks—" shouted the Rat. 

"—and rush in upon them," said the Badger.

"—and whack 'em, and whack 'em, and whack 'em!" cried the Toad in ecstasy, running round and round the room, and jumping over the chairs.

"Very well, then," said the Badger, resuming his usual dry manner, "our plan is settled, and there's nothing more for you to argue and squabble about. So, as it's getting very late, all of you go right off to bed at once. We will make all the necessary arrangements in the course of the morning to-morrow."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“But we have received a sign, Edith - a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm... in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig'... we have no ordinary pig."

"Well", said Mrs. Zuckerman, "it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.”

― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

Mythic Animals: “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”

― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Cryptozoology: To most persons familiar with the term, cryptozoology is seen as the study of such spectacular and disputed creatures as Sasquatch, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster. These legendary beasts do interest cryptozoologists, but such “cryptids” (as cryptozoologists call them) comprise only a fraction of the hidden, uncatalogued, or out-of-place animals that have intrigued and frustrated cryptozoologists before cryptozoology as such existed.

-Loren Coleman, Cryptozoology A To Z: The Encyclopedia Of Loch Monsters Sasquatch Chupacabras And Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature

Extinct Animals: Muldoon drove slowly toward the river, moving closer to the tyrannosaur. “But those are all mammals. We know a lot about handling mammals, because zoos are built around the big mammalian attractions—lions, tigers, bears, elephants. We know a lot less about reptiles. And nobody knows anything about dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are new animals.” “You consider them reptiles?” Gennaro said. “No,” Muldoon said, shifting gears. “Dinosaurs don’t fit existing categories.” He swerved to avoid a rock. “Actually, what we find is, the dinosaurs were as variable as mammals are today. Some dinos are tame and cute, and some are mean and nasty. Some of them see well, and some of them don’t. Some of them are stupid, and some of them are very, very intelligent.” “Like the raptors?” Gennaro said. Muldoon nodded. “Raptors are smart. Very smart. Believe me, all the problems we have so far,” he said, “are nothing compared with what we’d have if the raptors ever got out of their holding pen.

-Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

 THE JURASSIC PEROID marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper. Yes, the first true dinosaurs entered the scene at least 30 million years before the Jurassic began. But as we’ve seen, these earlier Triassic dinosaurs had not even a remote claim to being dominant. Then Pangea began to split, and he dinosaurs emerged from the ashes and found themselves with a new, much emptier world, which they proceeded to conquer.

Over the first few tens of millions of years of the Jurassic, dinosaurs diversified into a dizzying array of new species.  Entirely new subgroups originated, some of which would persist for another 130-plus million years.  They got larger and spread around the globe, colonizing humid areas, deserts , and every-thing in between. By the middle part of the Jurassic, the major types of dinosaurs could be found all over the world. That quint-essential image, so often repeated in museum exhibits and kids’ books, was real life: dinosaurs thundering across the land, at the top of the food chain, ferocious meat-eaters comingling with long-necked giants and armored and plated plant-eaters, the little mammals and lizards and frogs and other non-dinosaurs cowering in fear.

“Dinosaurs had been around for over 150 million years when their time of reckoning came. They had endured hardships, evolved superpowers like fast metabolisms and enormous size, and vanquished their rivals so that they ruled an entire planet…

Then, literally, in a split second, it ended.”

― Stephen Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

Amish/Christian

The world of the Amish is ripe for mystery, romance, horror, drama, and possibly comedy. It is true life time travel. You leave the advanced world of today and step into the past of the present. The Amish are a peculiar people with their own society, culture and customs and a landscape ready for any story you may throw at it.

- Mark Wilson

Amish Non-Fiction: “To air dry clothes by choice is countercultural. And who, more than any other group in twenty-first-century America, is both countercultural and committed to air drying clothes? Has intact families? Healthy communities? Gardens, home-cooked meals, and uncluttered homes? Restrained use of technology, strong local economies, and almost nonexistent debt? Most of all, what group has kept simplicity, service, and faith at the center of all they say and do? The Amish! All of which led to my epiphany: few of us can become Amish, but all of us can become almost Amish.”

― Nancy Sleeth, Almost Amish: One Woman's Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life

Amish Fiction: The strangers were coming, as they did every Thursday night, to bring a burst of color into our plain home. I circled the dining room, checking each lantern to be sure there was enough fuel inside. June sunlight streamed through the windows, but by the end of dinner we’d need the lanterns to brighten the room and help the guests find their way back to their cars, parked in a crooked row on the lawn behind our buggy.

I tried to settle my jittery limbs as I folded a napkin beside each plate. My head was filled with thoughts about what the strangers would look like and how many holes would be in their earlobes and how many colors would streak through their hair. My mother always scolded me that these guests were coming to dine on a simple Amish meal and take a peek at our lives. She didn’t want me to be peeking at theirs. They live in their world and we live in ours, she would say, as though that would satisfy my curiosity.

I’d often thought about what it would be like to meet English teenagers. In my imaginings I would strike up clever conversations with them, and they’d tell me about music and movies and dancing. But now they were here, and I was awkward and tongue-tied.

 “We may not have computers or telephones or television, but we have books and conversations. And we talk to each other in person, not through e-mails and texts.”

― Nancy Grossman, A World Away

Amish Memoir: The Old Order Amish are a pretty exclusive group. And there really aren’t that many around. By latest official count, right at a quarter million worldwide. It just seems as if there are a lot more, because, well, the Amish are so different. So visible. So quaint and old fashioned. And so ideal. At least from the outside. It’s not their fault that English society finds them endlessly fascinating. Mostly, they just prefer to be left alone. A few defining factors must exist for one to be considered Old Order. First, and most critical, no cars. Horse and buggy only for local transportation. Second, no electricity. Not in the house or in the outbuildings. Third, no telephones in the house. Old Order Amish fiercely and jealously defend these boundaries.

-Ira Wagler, Growing Up Amish: A Memoir 

Amish Fantastic: I was no stranger to death. We Amish lived close to the earth, under the watchful

watchful eye of God and all of his kingdom. I had helped with the butchering of pigs, mourned the loss of dogs at my kennel in whelping. I had stood at the bedsides of my grandparents when they died. I’d held my mother’s last child, a stillborn, and witnessed a neighbor die during childbirth. Those things had happened in normal life. But when life stopped and God’s kingdom fell into shadow, I saw death in an entirely different fashion. I had dressed the bodies of women in my community for burial, only to be forced to cut their heads off before daylight’s fingers of sunshine had left them. I had seen children torn asunder, reduced to unrecognizable smears on a ceiling. I had slain men who were once like brothers to me, impaled them, and burned them. I had seen too much. I had seen true Darkness.

-Laura Bickle, The Outside (The Hallowed Ones Book 2) 

Children’s

“I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.

My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it.”

― Lloyd Alexander

“The prime function of the children's book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years.

Roald Dahl”

― Roald dahl

 “Many adults feel that every children's book has to teach them something.... My theory is a children's book... can be just for fun.”

― R.L. Stine

Children’s Classics: “There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.”

― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Children’s Fantasy: “As he rose to his feet he noticed that he was neither dripping nor panting for breath as anyone would expect after being under water. His clothes were perfectly dry. He was standing by the edge of a small pool—not more than ten feet from side to side in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others—a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

Children’s Non-Fantasy: “How about mud?” Alan asked Billy. “You wouldn’t eat a bite of mud.”

Alan argued a lot, small knobby-kneed, nervous, gnawing at his thumbnail, his face smudged, his red hair mussed, shirttail hanging out, shoelaces untied.

“Sure I would,” Billy said. “Mud. What’s mud? Just kirt with a little water in it. My father says everyone eats a pound of dirt every year anyway.”

“How about worms?” Alan asked Billy.

“Sure,” said Billy. “Why not? Worms are just dirt.”

“Yeah, but they bleed.”

“So you’d have to cook them. Cows bleed.”

“I bet a hundred dollars you wouldn’t really eat a worm. You talk big now, but you wouldn’t if you were sitting at the dinner table with a worm on your plate.”

“I bet I would. I’d eat fifteen worms if somebody’d bet me a hundred dollars.”

“You really want to bet? I’ll bet you fifty dollars you can’t eat fifteen worms. I really will.”

-Thomas Rockwell, How to Eat Fried Worms 

Classic Lit: 

“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”

― Mark Twain

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”

― J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Comic Books/Graphic Novels/Magna

Comic Books:

For years they had lurked in the shadowy corners of popular culture, quietly pursuing their niche interests among themselves, keeping their heads down to avoid the inquisitive, judgmental gaze of the wider world. They called themselves fans, experts, otaku. Everyone else, of course, called them nerds. Nerds had spent decades creating and policing carefully wrought self-identities around their strictly specialized interests: comic books, computers, science fiction, video games, Dungeons & Dragons. What truly united them, however, were not the specific objects of their enthusiasm but the nature of their enthusiasm itself—the all-consuming degree to which they rejected the reflexive irony their peers prized. Instead, these fans blithely surrendered themselves to their passion. The rise of the Internet would fuel this passion by connecting them to others who shared it. In only a handful of years, their particular species of enthusiasm—“nerding out”—would supplant irony to become the dominant mode in which we engage with each other and with the culture around us.

-Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture 

About Comic Books: “Simon's walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color,

everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn't quite manga, wasn't quite comic book.”

― Kelley Armstrong, The Summoning

Reading classic and contemporary superhero comic books now, with the benefit of a Ph.D. in physics, I have found many examples of the correct description and application of physics concepts. Of course, nearly without exception, the use of superpowers themselves involves direct violations of the known laws of physics, requiring a deliberate and willful suspension of disbelief. However, many comics needed only a single “miracle exception”—one extraordinary thing you have to buy into—and the rest that follows as the hero and villain square off would be consistent with the principles of science. While the intent of these stories has always primarily been to entertain, if at the same time the reader was also educated, either deliberately or accidentally, this was a happy bonus.

-James Kakalios, The Physics of Superheroes

The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.

-Stan Lee

“Socrates should have written comics.”

― Mark Waid

 “Nowadays I’m really cranky about comics. Because most of them are just really, really poorly written soft-core. And I miss good old storytelling. And you know what else I miss? Super powers. Why is it now that everybody’s like “I can reverse the polarity of your ions!” Like in one big flash everybody’s Doctor Strange. I like the guys that can stick to walls and change into sand and stuff. I don’t understand anything anymore. And all the girls are wearing nothing, and they all look like they have implants. Well, I sound like a very old man, and a cranky one, but it’s true.”

― Joss Whedon

Comic Book Characters:

LEGEND HAS IT THAT SUPERMAN was born under a fiery red sun on the futuristic planet of Krypton, in a crystal tower overlooking the Jewel Mountains and the Scarlet Jungle. But the legend has it wrong. In fact, Superman was born under a hazy yellow sun in a gritty Jewish precinct of Cleveland, two blocks from the Hebrew Orthodox Old Age Home and down the street from Glenville High. Just ask Jerry Siegel. He’s the one who brought him to life there in the throes of the Great Depression.

-Larry Tye,  Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero

 “The world of full of exceptional people. The people in the world who do kindness, or search for the truth despite their lives being at risk. The engineers, the teachers, the doctors, and adoptive parents, the scholars and the firemen, and yes, the journalists. People who risk everything for the sake of others and those who simply try to help those whose needed be greater than their own. Those people inspire me, not the other way around.” -Superman, Strange Attractors

“Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe”

― Lex Luthor

Marvel’s colorful creations—the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange—built the groundwork for a self-contained fictional construct called “The Marvel Universe,” in which all heroes’ adventures were intertwined with great complexity. Soon their rapidly expanding world also included the likes of the X-Men, a gang of ostracized mutant schoolchildren whose struggle against discrimination paralleled the civil rights movement, and Daredevil, a blind lawyer whose other senses were heightened to inhuman levels. The Black Widow, Hawkeye, the Silver Surfer, and countless others followed. For twelve cents an issue, Marvel Comics delivered fascinatingly dysfunctional protagonists, literary flourishes, and eye-popping images to little kids, Ivy Leaguers, and hippies alike.

-Sean Howe, Marvel Comics :The Untold Story

Sauron: With the DNA we liberated from the grave desecration you call a museum, I have perfected the saurianization process. You rice paper puppets will be given forms befitting Earth's dominant species.

Spider-Man: You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you're using it to turn people into dinosaurs? But with tech like that, you could cure cancer!

Sauron: But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.

-Spider-Man and the X-Men Vol 1 2

Graphic Novel: “Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.”

― Bryan Lee O'Malley, Lost at Sea

“That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.”

― Alan Moore

“To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society”

― Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis

Manga: 

Manga refers to Japanese comic books, the series of which are often made into Japanese cartoons, or anime. The word is pronounced maw-nnnnn-gah. In Japanese, it is actually three syllables, although the middle "N" is spoken very quickly. Americans have a habit of pronouncing it "man-gah," but that is not actually correct.

The word manga can be translated as “humorous pictures.” The style became very popular in the mid-20th century when laws prohibiting the publication of those kinds of items were lifted. It has since become a huge part of Japanese culture. Unlike in America, manga is read by most people in the country in weekly comics. The artists and writers of manga are well respected for their work, much like the writers of literature in America. -Aaron Albert

“I like black for clothes, small items, and jewelry. It's a color that can't be violated by any other colors. A color that simply keeps being itself. A color that sinks more somberly than any other color, yet asserts itself more than all other colors. It's a passionate gallant color. Anything is wonderful if it transcends things rather than being halfway...” ― Yana Toboso, Black Butler, Vol. 1

Comic Strips: 

About Comic Strips:

 “In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities. A childhood that wasn't spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no wonder, seems too dull to imagine.”

― Sanhita Baruah

“I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they're in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too, the dancing Snoopy strips. The little boy Rerun drawing "basement" comics about Tarzan fighting Daffy Duck in a helicopter. Those are the bits that keep me reading. The funny parts! The fun parts. The silly bits that don't make any sense. And when I get to the sad lonely Peppermint Patty standing in a field wondering why nobody shook hands and said "good game," well, it works because that's not all she was. I try to think that way about everything. That's the kind of person I want to be.”

― Joey Comeau, We all got it coming

If you want to see a comic strip, you should see me in the shower.

-Groucho Marx

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

-Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

When my priest Fr. John wants a quick illustration of philosophical wit and whimsy wrapped in a laugh and a smile for his homilies, he always turns to the comic strips for inspirational material. The imaginative brilliance of little kids, a lazy fat cat or a boy and his talking tiger never fails to provide him with material for the Daily or Sunday Masses. – Mark Wilson

Comic Strip Characters:

Dilbert stands with a coffee cup behind Dogbert who wags his tail and types at his computer.

Dilbert: "What's your new management book about?"

Dogbert:  "It's a bunch of obvious advice packaged with quotes from famous dead people."

Dilbert: “Did Gandhi really say "Get that #!% dessert cart off my foot!"?"

Dogbert: He might have.

-Scott Adams, Dilbert

The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either.

-Walt Kelly , Pogo

 [Calvin and Hobbes are playing Scrabble]

Calvin: Ha! I've got a great word and it's on a "Double word score" box!

Hobbes: "ZQFMGB" isn't a word! It doesn't even have a vowel!

Calvin: It is so a word! It's a worm found in New Guinea! Everyone knows that!

Hobbes: I'm looking it up.

 Calvin: You do, and I'll look up that 12-letter word you played with all the Xs and Js!

Hobbes: What's your score for ZQFMGB?

Calvin: 957.

― Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Fan Fiction

About FF:

“Fanfiction isn't copying - it's a celebration. One long party, from the first capital letter to the last full stop!”

― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”

― Lev Grossman

 “Before the modern era of copyright and intellectual property, stories were things held in common, to be passed from hand to hand and narrator to narrator.”

― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.”

― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“The difference between fanfic and a "real" novel is that fanfic is honest about its inspiration.”

― Mary Robinette Kowal

“When I was still in One Direction, fans would write stories based on me and the other lads and publish them online, it's crazy to think that we inspired so many different stories and the opportunity for so much creativity from so many people all over the world.”

― Zayn Malik, Zayn: The Official Autobiography

“Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.”

― Michael Montoure, Slices

“But I don't want to write my own fiction,' Cath said, as emphatically as she could. 'I don't want to write my own characters or my own worlds -- I don't care about them. . . . I'd rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.”

― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

Some FF:

"If he remains here, his death is certain. If Kal-el remains here, he will surely die; just as the rest of us will. Sending him away is his only chance for survival; the only chance for the surivial of the Kryptonian race."

This eased her apprehension slightly, as Jor-el began to pace. He clearly did not like the idea of this anymore than Lara did. Yet, it was the only hope. There was nothing more that could be done. As much as he did not like this plan, he knew he must carry it out. They must.

"Where would we send him," Lara finally asked, breaking a long silence.

"Tatooine," was Jor-el's soft response?

"Tatooine?" Lara questioned alarmingly.

Before she could continue her protest, Jor-el broke in. "It is his best chance for survival. The planet's surface is very similar to that of Krypton. The inhabitants breathe the same type of air. Kal-el would thrive on Krypton. Plus, Ben is there. We may be able to get a message to him to ask him to watch over the child."

gjacklombardo, Superman: A New Hope

As he stepped though the doorway, Truman stepped into pitch-black darkness so think he feared for a moment that he had gone blind. He glanced back, but the light still shone from the soundstage.

The soundstage.. his world had been the set of a television show. He turned away from that phony light and walked into the darkness. He put his hands out before him, feeling hisway around, feeling for walls or other obstacles.

His eyes adjusted to the blackness. He made out shapes in the shadows: trucks for hauling large set pieces or what have you, piles of lumber and other things he couldn’t identify. He roped around them, trying to find a door out.

-Matrix Refugee, The Truman Show II: Through the Door in the Sky

 “Hermione looked at him, not blinking. It was a moment before she replied, “I know that you served your time on Azkaban Station.” She looked out the porthole into the inky blackness of space, twirling her fork between her fingers. “Everyone here is hoping for a clean slate when they reach Alpha Centauri, but that will only happen if we all agree to forget and forgive the past. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve earned your redemption.”

― Refictionista, Alpha Centauri

Extended Universe

“Star Trek?” I asked her. “Really?”

“What?” she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together.

“There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly,” I said. “Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking.”

She sniffed. “This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It’s okay to like both.”

“Blasphemy and lies,” I said.”

― Jim Butcher, Ghost Story

Dr. Who: The Time Lord was late. He was in trouble, and he’d been summoned to the Convocation of Oblivion to account for his actions. His august peers had gathered in a tall tower in a tall city to hear one of his tall stories. ‘He’s going to say he saved the universe again,’ huffed one to another, running a finger around his stiff collar. ‘It’s still where we left it, isn’t it?’ his friend sneered. He’d been a junior archivist for three thousand years, and, in his experience, the universe continued much as it always had done. These were the Time Lords of the planet Gallifrey and they were the most powerful creatures ever to exist.

A light stabbed down onto the stage, and a figure staggered into the beam, pinned there like a butterfly. A Zero Nun left her seat in the front row, striding up to the Renegade, and bowed to him with exaggerated courtesy. ‘Have you anything to say for yourself?’

‘All right,’ I told her. ‘But in order to do so, I need to teach you about fear.’

‘Fear?’ she blinked. That got her.

‘Yes.’ I addressed the entire chamber. ‘You see, even the Time Lords are afraid of something. And tonight, I’m going to show you what that is. Are you sitting comfortably? Of course you are. And I’m rather afraid that’s the problem …’

-Tom Baker, Doctor Who: Scratchman 

Star Trek:

The ingenious writers of Star Trek, on whom you depend, have not yet invented inertial dampers, which they will introduce sometime later in the series. You have been defeated by nothing more exotic than Isaac Newton’s laws of motion—the very first things one can forget about high school physics. OK, I know some trekkers out there are saying to themselves, “How lame! Don’t give me Newton. Tell me things I really want to know, like ‘How does warp drive work?’ or ‘What is the flash before going to warp speed—is it like a sonic boom?’ or ‘What is a dilithium crystal anyway?’” All I can say is that we will get there eventually. Travel in the Star Trek universe involves some of the most exotic concepts in physics. But many different aspects come together before we can really address everyone’s most fundamental question about Star Trek: “Is any of this really possible, and if so, how?”

-Lawrence M Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek 

Jim Kirk sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge and watched as Spacedock gradually grew larger, rotating slowly on its axis like some gigantic burnished metal top. Beyond it, suspended in the void of space, hung a sphere of marbled blue-white: Earth. The Enterprise was coming home. Impossible not to feel a tug of nostalgia at the sight: it had been no fewer than five years since he last stood on Earth, five years since he last witnessed this very sight—only then, Earth and Spacedock had been receding as the Enterprise moved away toward the unknown reaches of space.

-J.M. Dillard, The Lost Years (Star Trek: The Original Series) 

“These tunnels are where they found Data’s head a few years back.”

“Assuming you are referring to Lieutenant Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise, I was under the impression that his head has remained attached to his person.”

“This was his head from the past. He went back in time, it got knocked off, gathered dust here for five hundred years, and got put back on.”

She frowned. “So his head’s twenty times older than the rest of him. I wonder what that does to the warranty.”

“According to the records, that was a ‘prank’ on the part of some cadets from Starfleet Academy—another of your emotional representations.”

Katie grinned. “That’s the official story. Of course, time-travel evidence gets classified. Too dangerous, you know. Imagine the havoc someone could cause if they knew how to go back and mess around with the past.”

-Star Trek: Corps of Engineers: Aftermath (Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers Book 8) . 

Star Wars:

Star Wars is primarily set in a region of space referred to as “the galaxy.” Images of this region show it as a spiral galaxy (much like the Milky Way) divided into regions like the core, inner rim, outer rim, etc. The galactic core is home to the governing center of Coruscant, whereas the outer rim has planets such as Tatooine, run by gangsters and outlaws. Characters frequently refer to various “systems” or “star systems” (rather than solar systems) in the galaxy, then use a planet name when identifying a specific system (e.g., the Hoth system). This would be like calling our solar system the Earth system rather than the Sun system. This makes sense if most travel is to/from one planet within a system, but it might make the galaxy seem smaller than it really is. Does the number of planets/systems identified in Star Wars make sense for one galaxy? Is the layout of these systems realistic?

-Patrick Johnson, The Physics of Star Wars: The Science Behind a Galaxy Far, Far Away 

“I'm just saying --' He pointed the way that Han appeared to be favoring. '--this doesn't feel right'

'Yeah, well, we're on a Star Destroyer being chased by the living dead. NONE of this feels right”

― Joe Schreiber, Death Troopers

In the dead of night, he was jolted awake a second time by a mechanical arm prodding his access compartment. He squealed, swinging his body around to dislodge the thing poking him. The silver-and-blue droid stood before him, caught in the act of sabotage, his pincer appendage dangling in the air. He whimpered a sad apology.

The red droid bleated indignation. Sorry for sabotaging me? Or sorry you were caught?

Yes, the other replied. Then he introduced himself: I’m R2-D2, and I’m on an important mission. The red droid stared. Obviously, the excitement of capture and restraint had overrun the R2 unit’s circuits. Still, he chose to respond in kind.

I’m R5-D4. No mission—that I know of. My memory was wiped four years ago. R2-D2 continued as if he hadn’t heard.

I must be sold tomorrow. I have to escape this sandcrawler. The fate of the galaxy depends on it. What a strange droid. Is that why your pincer was deep in my access compartment? he asked. You were sabotaging your competition?

Yes. Please, the Rebellion needs your help. The word Rebellion triggered something—the phantom of a memory. An imprint on his circuits that no wipe could touch. Or maybe he was simply moved by R2-D2’s sincerity. Whatever it was, he almost believed. But the superior programming of R2 units made them capable of deception in certain circumstances; everyone knew that. He couldn’t trust a single word the blue droid said.

-Renée Ahdieh, From a Certain Point of View (Star Wars) 

Fantasy

“Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.”

― Walt Disney

Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

-Brian Froud

Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of 'fantasy.'

- Robin Hobb

But does a fantasy story actually require magic and the supernatural to be a fantasy? It would seem so at first, but then there are books such as the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik that don’t have any magic in them at all but do have dragons fighting in the Napoleonic War. Then there’s Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which is not found in the fantasy section of the bookstore despite the fact that the books involve characters in an alternate world that can travel into books and meet the characters that live there. Most people would definitely assume that a series involving people spending time in other books a fantasy novel! Then you have Terry Goodkind and his Sword of Truth series; he writes what would be considered traditional fantasy, but, as he says, he isn’t writing fantasy at all.2 Who is right? It’s hard to say.

-Gabrielle Lissauer, The Tropes of Fantasy Fiction 

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”

― Patrick Rothfuss

I want to see people flying around on dragons, in steam ships built by gnomes, and on newfangled contraptions that could blow up at any moment and often do! – I want to see people sailing about on ships and in hot air balloons and even in chariots that zip about on rudimentary roads and while getting broken wheels constantly! – I want to see people popping into the room via spell or teleportation gate or portal of some sort, and I want them to do so with style and panache and the wherewithal to make it appear like they’re not fazzled. – I want all of those things you see, because this is fantasy fiction and that’s what’s been promised to me.  Or is that not the premise we’re talking about when we say fantasy? Maybe your idea of fantasy is a little different from mine. Maybe it’s in the here and now with cars and trains and even planes, and maybe characters do travel about like you and I. Not in my world, bub, not at all.

-Greg Strandberg, How to Write Fantasy

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? . . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

Classic Fantasy: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit or There and Back Again

Contemporary Fantasy: BY now, you must have guessed just how far Artemis Fowl was prepared to go in order to achieve his goal. But what exactly was this goal? What outlandish scheme would involve the blackmailing of an alcohol-addicted sprite? The answer was gold. He immersed himself in the lore of the People until he had compiled a huge database on their characteristics. But it wasn’t enough. So Artemis put out a call on the Web: Irish businessman will pay large amount of U.S. dollars to meet a fairy, sprite, leprechaun, pixie. The responses had been mostly fraudulent, but Ho Chi Minh City had finally paid off. Artemis was perhaps the only person alive who could take full advantage of his recent acquisition. He still retained a childlike belief in magic, tempered by an adult determination to exploit it. If there was anybody capable of relieving the fairies of some of their magical gold, it was Artemis Fowl the Second.

-Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl

Fairy Tales: “Once upon a time' These are the most magical words our world has ever known and the gateway to the greatest stories ever told. They're an immediate calling to anyone who hears them-a calling into a world where everyone is welcome and anything can happen. Mice can become men, maids can become princesses, and they can teach valuable lessons in the process.”

― Chris Colfer, The Wishing Spell

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

Harry Potter: “A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley...He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

What philosophically literate reader doesn’t hear an echo of Nietzsche in Voldemort’s words that there is no good or evil, only power and those too weak to use it? Or imagine that, if Aristotle ran Hogwarts, he’d act a lot like Dumbledore? Or see the parallel between Harry’s invisibility cloak and Plato’s Ring of Gyges?

-David Baggett,  Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts 

And, at the ever-expanding horizon of scientific knowledge, new questions, puzzles and mysteries will continue to emerge as surely as existing mysteries are solved. Let’s get off to a flying start and reveal what the somewhat magical-sounding fields of antigravity, wormholes and quantum teleportation have to say about wizard transport, whether by broomstick, Floo powder or that muddy old footwear that turns out to be a Portkey to another place, time or dimension. As the great Albus Dumbledore would say, tuck in.

-Roger Highfield, The Science of Harry Potter

The reason to embrace and celebrate these novels as the countercultural event that they are is due largely to the subliminal messages delivered by Harry and friends in their stolen wheelbarrows. Readers walk away, maybe a little softer on the occult than they were, but with story-embedded messages: the importance of a pure soul; love's power even over death; about sacrifice and loyalty; a host of images and shadows about Christ and how essential 'right belief' is for personal transformation and victory over internal and external evils.”

― John Granger, The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure

“CUSTOMER: Which was the first Harry Potter book?

BOOKSELLER: The Philosopher’s Stone.

CUSTOMER: And the second?

BOOKSELLER: The Chamber of Secrets.

CUSTOMER: I’l take The Chamber of Secrets. I don’t want The Philosopher’s Stone.

BOOKSELLER: Have you already read that one?

CUSTOMER: No, but with series of books I always find they take a while to really get going. I don’t want to waste my time with the useless introductory stuff at the beginning.

BOOKSELLER: The story in Harry Potter actually starts right away. Personally, I do recommend that you start with the first book – and it’s very good.

CUSTOMER: Are you working on commission?

BOOKSELLER: No.

CUSTOMER: Right. How many books are there in total?

BOOKSELLER: Seven.

CUSTOMER: Exactly. I’m not going to waste my money on the first book when there are so many others to buy. I’l take the second one.

BOOKSELLER: . . . If you’re sure.

(One week later, the customer returns)

BOOKSELLER: Hi, did you want to buy a copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban?

CUSTOMER: What’s that?

BOOKSELLER: It’s the book after The Chamber of Secrets.

CUSTOMER: Oh, no, definitely not. I found that book far too confusing. I ask you, how on earth are children supposed to understand it if I can’t? I mean, who the heck is that Voldemort guy anyway? No. I’m not going to bother with the rest.

BOOKSELLER: . . .”

― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

On the steps of number 23232323.32 Privy drive, Somewhere in England, (land of Shakespeare, British accents, and saying crisps when you mean chips) a baby left in an asparagus crate on a doorstep screamed and screamed. His survival was another such miracle, given how many people wanted him dead. Or at least severely hurt. The asparagus seller probably would have settled for getting his crate back, since all of his little asparaguses were currently rolling about helplessly on the floor. But the incredibly evil bad guy planning to take over the world definitely wanted him dead. It was in his job description.

-Valerie Frankel , Henry Potty and the Pet Rock . sci-fi-cafe.com

Urban Fantasy: “The Nightside CSI is only one man, pleasant enough, calm and easy going, and very professional. It probably helps that he has multiple personality disorder with a sub-personality for every specialty and discipline in his profession. One to handle fingerprints, another to examine blood splatter or look for magical residues...He's really quite good at his job though he does tend to argue with himself.

Between himself he knows everything he needs to know. Each sub-personality has a different voice. Some of them are women. I've never asked.”

― Simon R. Green, A Hard Day's Knight

General Fiction

About Fiction:

“I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction”

― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”

― Tom Clancy

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

― Stephen King

"General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else."

— Marvin Minsky

“That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”

― Connie Willis, Passage

Some General Fiction:

“I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”

― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

 “When I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jumping into the other’s head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.”

― Emma Donoghue, Room

Harold thought of all the things in life he’d let go. The small smiles. The offers of a beer. The people he had passed over and over again, in the brewery car park, or on the street, without lifting his head. The neighbors whose forwarding addresses he had never kept. Worse: the son who didn’t speak to him and the wife he had betrayed. He remembered his father in the nursing home, and his mother’s suitcase by the door. And now here was a woman who twenty years ago had proved herself a friend. Was this how it went? That just at the moment when he wanted to do something, it was too late? That all the pieces of a life must eventually be surrendered, as if in truth they amounted to nothing? The knowledge of his helplessness pressed down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There must be a way to make a difference.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

He pictured Queenie dozing at one end of England and himself in a phone booth at the other, with things in between that he didn’t know and could only imagine: roads, fields, rivers, woods, moors, peaks and valleys, and so many people. He would meet and pass them all. There was no deliberation, no reasoning. The decision came in the same moment as the idea. He was laughing at the simplicity of it. “Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. Because I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living. Will you say that?” The voice said she would. Was there anything else? Did he know visiting hours, for instance? Parking restrictions? He repeated, “I’m not in a car. I want her to live.” “I’m sorry. Did you say something about your car?” “I’m coming by foot. From South Devon all the way up to Berwick-upon-Tweed.” The voice gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s a terrible line. What are you doing?” “I’m walking,” he shouted. “I see,” said the voice slowly, as if she had picked up a pen and was jotting this down. “Walking. I’ll tell her. Should I say anything else?” “I’m setting off right now. As long as I walk, she must live. Please tell her this time I won’t let her down.”

-Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Horror

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

― Stephen King

“Merrin stood up and prayed reverently: “ ‘God, Creator and defender of the human race, look down in pity on this your servant, Regan Teresa MacNeil, now trapped in the coils of man’s ancient enemy, sworn foe of our race, who…’ ” Karras glanced up as he heard Regan hissing, saw her sitting erect with the whites of her eyes exposed, while her tongue flicked in and out rapidly, her head weaving slowly back and forth like a cobra’s, and once again he had that feeling of disquiet. He looked down at his text. “ ‘Save your servant,’ ” prayed Merrin, standing and reading from the Ritual. “ ‘Who trusts in you, my God,’ ” answered Karras. “ ‘Let her find in you, Lord, a fortified tower.’ ” “ ‘In the face of the enemy.’ ” As Merrin continued with the next line—“Let the enemy have no power over her”—Karras heard a gasp from Sharon behind him, and turning quickly around, he saw her looking stupefied”

― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

Mystery

About Mystery:

“There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people:

psychopaths and mystery writers.”

― Richard Castle

Ed McBain (author of the 87th Precinct series) once said in an interview that we read mysteries because they “reconfirm our faith that a society of laws can work.” Indeed, they do that.

-James N Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Mystery.

Verisimilitude: this is a big word that you should know. It means, the appearance of something that is true or real. The steps in how your mystery or thriller character proceeds, the details of his investigation, and the statements that he makes regarding a criminal case must ring true. There are too many experts out in reader-land, and if you try to fudge or write something that doesn’t seem believable, you’ve lost your credibility as a writer, but just as important, you’ve probably lost readers. Faux pas in writing are indelible—they are inscribed in ink on paper or as digital text in e-readers, and, unlike a misstep in a conversation that you can apologize for, errors are there for the lifetime of your publication.- Andrea Campbell

-Sherry Ellis, Now Write! Mysteries (Now Write! Series)

“As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.”

― Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders

Our surrogate, the smarter, wittier, and more doggedly determined version of ourselves: the detective hero. Whether a street wise cop like Popeye Doyle in the French Connection, a sloppy homicide detective like TV’s Columbo, or a tea-drinking, sweater-knitting old lady like Miss Marple, we want this one thing from our mystery protagonist above all others: we want order restored.

- Dennis Palumbo, Taking the Mystery Out of Writing Mysteries

The Mysteries We read:

Actual Mystery:

“The oth­ers went up­stairs, a slow unwilling pro­ces­sion. If this had been an old house, with creak­ing wood, and dark shad­ows, and heav­ily pan­elled walls, there might have been an eerie feel­ing. But this house was the essence of moder­ni­ty. There were no dark corners - no pos­si­ble slid­ing pan­els - it was flood­ed with elec­tric light - every­thing was new and bright and shining. There was noth­ing hid­den in this house, noth­ing con­cealed. It had no at­mo­sphere about it. Some­how, that was the most fright­en­ing thing of all. They ex­changed good-nights on the up­per land­ing. Each of them went in­to his or her own room, and each of them automatical­ly, al­most with­out con­scious thought, locked the door....”

― Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

“Where does a wise man hide a pebble?"

And the tall man answered in a low voice: "On the beach."

The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf?"

And the other answered: "In the forest.

But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.”

― G K Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown

 “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

'But what I should like to know,' pursued Miss Barton, refusing to be diverted, 'is whether this dilettante gentleman does anything, outside his hobbies of detecting crimes and collecting books, and, I believe, playing cricket in his off-time.' Harriet, who had been congratulating herself upon the way in which she was keeping her temper, was seized with irritation. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Does it matter? Why should he do anything else? Catching murderers isn't a soft job, or a sheltered job. It takes a lot of time and energy, and you may very easily get injured or killed. I dare say he does it for fun, but at any rate, he does do it. Scores of people must have as much reason to thank him as I have. You can't call that nothing.'

-Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night

LGBT:

“Did you just tell us you're gay?" asks Nick.

"Yes."

"Okay," he says. Abby swats him. "What?"

"That's all you're going to say? Okay?"

"He said not to make a big deal out of it," Nick says. "What am I supposed to say?"

"Say something supportive. I don't know. Or awkwardly hold his hand like I did. Anything."

Nick and I look at each other.

"I'm not holding your hand," I tell him, smiling a little.

"All right" --he nods-- "but know that I would.”

― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”

― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Picture Books

“I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”

― Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.

- Anthony Browne

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20

-Eric Carle

“And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.

-Kate DiCamillo

A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.

-Tomie dePaola

Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.

-Kirby Larson

Carrying a small notebook with you always, in your pocket or purse, along with a reliable ballpoint pen will enable you to jot down spot observations and quick character sketches before the first sharp impressions fade away. You'll need all kinds of story actors, because even picture books can include a wide range of ages, relationships, occupations, and nationalities. Learn to observe and analyze swiftly, wherever you are.

-Lee Wyndham

 “If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk. When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask you for a straw. When he’s finished, he’ll ask you for a napkin.”

 “Then he’ll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.”

 “When he looks in the mirror, he might notice his hair needs a trim. So he’ll probably ask for a pair of nail scissors.”

 “When he’s finished giving himself a trim, he’ll want a broom to sweep it up. He’ll start sweeping. He might get carried away and sweep every room in the house. He may even end up washing the floors as well!

― Laura Numero, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Public Domain

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

So, I feel terrible for poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll, who must be spinning in their graves since they have no rights to their own works of fiction anymore. I'm all for readers being able to read books for free once and only when the deceased author's copyright eventually ends. Still though, did Doyle ever think in a million years that his wonderful characters would be dragged through the mud of every pervy fanfiction that the sick internet geek can think of to create? Did Carroll ever suspect that Alice and the Hatter would become freakish clown-like goth caricatures in Tim Burton's CGI-infested films? Would Austen really want her writing to be sold as badly-formatted ebooks?

The sharing of this Public Domain content isn't really an issue. Stories are meant to be told, meant to echo onward forever. That's what makes them magical. That being said, in the Information Age, there's a real lack of respect towards the creators of this original content. If, when I've been dead for 70 years and I then no longer have the rights to my novels, somebody gets the bright idea of doing anything funny with any of those novels, my ghost is going to rise from the grave and do some serious ass-kicking.”

― Rebecca McNutt

Da Vinci’s final notebook, the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s last airplane, the civilization of Atlantis—none of these long-lost items holds more value for the student of history than the famed “battered tin dispatch-box” in which Dr. John H. Watson claimed to have stored the records of a number of cases he shared with Sherlock Holmes and never published. Surely it is there that we will find the shocking particulars of the adventure of the giant rat of Sumatra, “a story for which the world is not yet prepared,”

Before I begin my narrative, I feel that it is my duty to set the reader straight upon a number of erroneous statements made recently regarding the events therein described. I refer in particular to a spurious monograph which has enjoyed a certain amount of popularity since it first appeared some four months ago, authored by an Irishman by the name of Bram Stoker, and entitled Dracula. To begin with, the book, which purports to be a collection of letters and journals written by some of the principal figures involved, completely ignores the part which Sherlock Holmes (and, to a lesser extent, myself) played in bringing that affair to its successful conclusion among the snow-capped peaks of Transylvania.

Although Holmes does not agree, it is my belief that Professor Van Helsing induced Stoker to deliberately falsify the facts where our line of investigation transected his, in order to build up his own reputation as a supernatural detective, and to invent entire episodes to explain the discrepancies. That I do not make these charges lightly will be borne out by what follows.

-Loren D.  Estleman, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Vs. Dracula .

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

— Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, #1))

“Oh!” Alice’s Adventures Underground? What sort of title was that? And why was her name misspelled? She had told Dodgson how to correctly spell her name, had even written it out for him. “By Lewis Carroll?” she read with growing concern. “I thought it would be more festive than saying it was by a reverend.” Festive? She had told him little that was festive. Concern was fast turning to alarm, but she swallowed it. What mattered was that he had faithfully recorded her history in Wonderland as she remembered it. She turned to the first chapter and immediately felt as if her insides had been scooped out, like the half grapefruits Dean Liddell ate for breakfast every morning, after which only raw, pulpy hollows remained. Down a rabbit hole? Where had the worrisome White Rabbit come from? “Alice, is something wrong?” She skipped ahead, turned page after page. The Pool of Tears, the caterpillar, her aunt Redd: It had all been twisted into nonsense. “I admit that I took a few liberties with your story,” Dodgson explained,

-Frank Beddor. The Looking Glass Wars 

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale

Romance

“I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome.

"Okay," he said. He took a breath. "What would you do, if you could do anything?"

I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. "This," I said. And then I kissed him.”

― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.”

― Janet Evanovich

“She understood now why her friend Elizabeth, with her near-genius, analytical mind gave wide berth to murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, and horror stories, and read only romance novels. Because when a woman picked up one of those steamy books, she had a firm guarantee that there would be a Happily-Ever-After. That though the world outside those covers could bring such sorrow and disappointment and loneliness, between those covers, the world was a splendid place to be.”

― Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever

“About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him-and I didn’t know how potent that part might be-that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”

― Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

“Halfway down the aisle, Jamie suddenly seemed to tire, and they stopped while she caught her breath...It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.”

― Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember (My Favorite Novel)

“Choosing a husband was much like choosing a good baguette. One looked for a strong outer shell, a tender interior, and most importantly, a tractability of dough to hold whatever shape the baker deemed appropriate. Abigail needed a good baguette by the end of the weeek”

― Karen Witemeyer, More Than Words Can Say

Sci-Fi:

All fiction is really science fiction.

I mean, despite its apparent realism, the political thriller ‘House of Cards’ is really an alternate universe story where someone other than John Major became prime minister after Margaret Thatcher, right?

Every single work of fiction takes place in a universe where history unfolded in a different way than it did in this one (sometimes with different laws of nature as well).

Even apparently realistic stories are about alternate universes with alternate histories.

So . . . everyone's a science fiction fan whether they realize it or not.

 -Jimmy Akin

Aliens: “Where are you originally from?”

“The planet Lorien, three hundred million miles away.”

“Must have been a long trip, John Smith.”

“Took almost a year. Next time I’m bringing a book.”

― Pittacus Lore, The Power of Six

Alternate History/Steampunk: Stonewall Jackson survived Chancellorsville.  England broke the Union’s naval blockade, and formally recognized the Confederate States of America.  Atlanta never burned.

It is 1880. The American Civil War has raged for nearly two decades, driving technology in strange and terrible directions. Combat dirigibles skulk across the sky and armored vehicles crawl along the land.  Military scientists twist the laws of man and nature, and barter their souls for weapons powered by light, fire, and steam.

But life struggles forward for soldiers and ordinary citizens.  The fractured nation is dotted with stricken towns and epic scenes of devastation—some manmade, and some more mysterious.  In the western territories cities are swallowed by gas and walled away to rot while the frontiers are strip-mined for resources.  On the borders between North and South, spies scour and scheme, and smugglers build economies more stable than their governments.

This is the Clockwork Century.

It is dark here, and different.

Tanglefoot (A Story of the Clockwork Century) by Cherie Priest

Historical Sci-Fi: In the year of grace 1345, Well I remember the day. I was out on an errand. The weather had turned sunny after rain, the town street was ankle-deep in mud. I picked my way through the aimless crowds of soldiery, nodding to such as I knew. All at once a great cry arose. I lifted my head like the others. Lo! It was as a miracle! Down through the sky, seeming to swell monstrously with the speed of its descent, came a ship all of metal. So dazzling was the sunlight off its polished sides that I could not see its form clearly. A huge cylinder, I thought, easily two thousand feet long. Save for the whistle of wind, it moved noiseless.

“Hold fast!” I cried. “Be not afraid! Have faith and hold fast!” My feeble pipings went unheard. Then Red John Hameward, the captain of the longbowmen, leaped up beside me. A merry giant, with hair like spun copper and fierce blue eyes, he had been my friend since he arrived here.

“I know not what yon thing is,” he bellowed. His voice rolled over the general babble, which died away.

“Mayhap some French trick. Or it may be friendly, which would make our fear look all the sillier. Follow me, every soldier, to meet it when it lands!”

“Magic!” cried an old man. “‘Tis sorcery, and we are undone!”

“Not so,” I told him. “Sorcery cannot harm good Christians.”

“But I am a miserable sinner,” he wailed.

“St. George and King Edward!”

Red John sprang off the tube and dashed down the street. I tucked up my robe and panted after him, trying to remember the formulas of exorcism.

-Poul Anderson, The High Crusade

Robots:

“The Three Laws of Robotics:

1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law;

― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

Spaceships: “I couldn’t see the end of the corridor, so I stared at the entrance. The ship was a magnificent piece of living technology. Third Fish was a Miri 12, a type of ship closely related to a shrimp. Miri 12s were stable calm creatures with natural exoskeletons that could withstand the harshness of space. They were genetically enhanced to grow three breathing chambers within their bodies. Scientists planted rapidly growing plants within these three enormous rooms that not only produced oxygen from the CO2 directed in from other parts of the ship, but also absorbed benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. This was some of the most amazing technology I’d ever read about. Once settled on the ship, I was determined to convince someone to let me see one of these amazing rooms. But at the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the technology of the ship. I was on the threshold now, between home and my future.”

― Nnedi Okorafor, Binti

Superheroes(NOT DC/MARVEL/COMICS):

“It’s good for you to think of this, son. Ponder. Worry. Stay up nights, frightened for the casualties of your ideology. It will do you good to realize the price of fighting. “I need to warn you of something, however. There aren’t any answers to be found. There are no good choices. Submissiveness to a tyrant or chaos and suffering. In the end I chose the second, though it flays my soul to do so. If we don’t fight, humankind is finished. We slowly become sheep to the Epics, slaves and servants—stagnant.”

― Brandon Sanderson, Steelheart

Cape (plural capes): literally, a sleeveless garment hanging from the neck over the back and shoulders; figuratively, a superhuman who has chosen to act as a superhero. Synonyms: hero, mask, super, superhero. Connotations: 'cape' is used as both a familiar and derogatory term for superheroes, who often casually refer to themselves as capes but generally consider it a demeaning term when applied to them by the press. Barlow's Guide to Superhumans

-Marion G Harmon, Wearing the Cape: The Beginning (Wearing the Cape Series Book 1) 

Space Travel: “Dress yourself in heavy fishing waders, put on an overcoat and boxing gloves and a bucket over your head, then have somebody strap two sacks of cement across your shoulders and you will know what a space suit feels like under one gravity.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit-Will Travel

Time Travel: THEY buried him on a gray morning, unseasonably cold, threatening rain. The mourners were few, easily constraining their grief for a man who had traditionally kept his acquaintances at a distance. The preacher was white-haired, feeble, himself near the end, and Dave wondered what he was thinking as the wind rattled the pages of his prayer book. “Ashes to ashes—” Shel had been the first time traveler. Well, the second, really. His father had been first. But of all the people assembled at the funeral, only Dave was aware of any of that.

Dave already missed Shel’s voice, his sardonic view of the world, his amused cynicism. He sighed. The world was a cruel and painful place. Enjoy life while you can. He remembered his grandfather once commenting that he should live life to the fullest. “While you can,” he’d said, his intense sea-blue eyes locked on Dave. “You only get a few decades in the daylight. Assuming you’re lucky.”

He got out of the car, went inside, and locked up. He didn’t usually drink alone, but today he was willing to make an exception. He poured a brandy and stared out the window. The sky, finally, was clearing. It would be a pleasant evening. In back somewhere, something moved. It might have been a branch, but it sounded inside the house.

He dismissed it. It had been a long day, and he was tired. He sank into a chair and closed his eyes. It came again. A floorboard, maybe. Not much more than a whisper. He took down a golf club, went into the hallway, looked up the staircase and along the upper level. Glanced toward the kitchen. Wood creaked. Upstairs. A hinge, maybe. He started up, as quietly as he could. He was about halfway when the closed door to the middle bedroom clicked. Someone was turning the knob. Dave froze. The door opened. And Shel appeared. “Hi, Dave,” he said.

-Jack McDevitt, Time Travelers Never Die 

Sci Fi Writing:

“...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honor when they applaud the tale you tell.”

― Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science fiction is the literature of ideas? Sure it is—on a tightly rationed basis! The truth is, most writers of science fiction and fantasy are naturally stingy. We tend to hoard ideas, like the dragon Smaug lying on his treasure. We parcel them out in dribs and drabs. One notion per story. Maybe two High Concepts per novel.

-Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction (A Maximalist And Recomplicated Travel Into Sci-Fi)

Within your texts nobody, be he slave or king, philosopher or lunatic, can consider a thought or experience a feeling without your say so. Without your specification, no one within your texts has any thoughts or feelings, or any existence at all. Writers of realistic fiction use this power sparingly, but it has no limitations of its own; a writer of fantastic fictions can easily overstep the bounds of actual existence. Within your texts, anything can happen; all you have to do is say so. If the crippled boy requires a miracle before he can walk again, you can work it simply by saying “and then he got up and walked.” If you want God to descend from His Heaven to bow down before the child in question and apologize for putting him in the wheelchair in the first place all you have to do is write it down. Within your story, even God is only one more character (or not, if you care to rule Him out); the power of Creation rests entirely in your hands. Within your story, not a sparrow will fall without your taking the trouble to record its fall, and if you do not want sparrows to fall at all you can save the entire species from that inconvenience with a single sentence. Writing might be unalloyed joy, were it not for the fact that power is always shadowed by responsibility. Thankfully, the absolute power that writers have is not weighted down with absolute responsibility. It can neither be suppressed nor diminished, except by choice. All writers know, however, that the joy to be obtained from creativity is not a product of the writing process—actual writing is hard work, more taxing in some respects than manual labor—but a matter of looking back at something written and taking pride in the accomplishment.

-Brian Stableford, Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

Over the last decade the hard bright lines of genre have disappeared. You can lay the blame on the reduction in physical bookstores, literary cross-genre courageousness, or the alignment of planets—but the effect is real. The labels sci-fi, horror, and fantasy have shifted and blurred so that it is difficult to tell where the lines are anymore. Margaret Atwood refuses to label The Handmaid’s Tale as science fiction, but instead calls it speculative fiction. Is PAN’S LABYRINTH fantasy, horror, magical realism, or something else entirely? Hard science fiction, once the domain of two-dimensional characters, is now littered with fully realized personalities. You can find high fantasy written in clear journalistic prose, and horror concerns itself not just with fighting the zombies, but with offering a plausible explanation for how the zombies came to be. The need for the term dark fantasy to describe works such as the Dark Tower series and Imajica is itself a testament to the way these genre lines have bled into each other. The blurring of genre creates readers who want something they’ve never seen before. Despite there only being two (or seven, or thirty-six) “fundamental” plots, we can still satisfy the reader’s needs by having a new combination of ideas and creating an emotional core for all your characters.

-Laurie Lamson, Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (Now Write! Series

“I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.”

― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.”

― China Miéville

Sports

“Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.”

― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.”

– Nelson Mandela

“Basketball Rule #1

In this game of life

your family is the court

and the ball is your heart.

No matter how good you are,

no matter how down you get,

always leave

your heart

on the court.”

― Kwame Alexander, The Crossover

“Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.”

― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”

― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Thriller

 “(He ran) toward the small pond that he had seen before. The walls of fire ended there. An instant later the remains of the cottage exploded. He ducked and rolled again from the concussive force, almost pitching into the right side of the wall of fire. He rose and redoubled his efforts, thinking that he would reach the water. Water was a great antidote to fire. But as he neared the edge of the pond, something struck him. No scum. No algae on the surface although the ground around was full of it. What could kill green scum? And why was he being forced to run right toward the one thing that could possibly save him? Robie tossed his gun over the top of the wall of flames, pulled off his jacket, covered his head and hands with it, and threw himself through the wall of flames on the left side.”

― David Baldacci, The Hit

Thrillers provide such a rich literary feast. There are all kinds. The legal thriller, spy thriller, action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military thriller. The list goes on and on, with new variations constantly being invented. In fact, this openness to expansion is one of the genre's most enduring characteristics. But what gives the variety of thrillers a common ground is the intensity of emotions they create, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill. By definition, if a thriller doesn't thrill, it's not doing its job.

— James Patterson, June 2006, "Introduction," Thriller

“If there's one thing I've learned in all my time working with children, if I could whittle those years down to a single revelation, it's this: They are extraordinarily resilient. They can withstand neglect; they can survive abuse; they can endure, even thrive, where adults would collapse like umbrellas.”

― A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window

War

Revolutionary War: “How old are you Johnny" she asked.

Sixteen."

And what's that-a boy or a man?"

He laughed. "A boy in time of peace and a man in time of war.”

― Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

I’D LIKE TO START at the beginning—believe me—but the problem is I don’t know when it began and I don’t know when it will end. I only know the middle, which is now, or more specifically ten minutes ago, when someone shot General George Washington stone-cold dead. And today is Christmas Day.

-David Potter, The Left Behinds: The iPhone that Saved George Washington 

Civil War: “To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is … a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”

― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

By the time everyone converged, mug in hand, on Rhoodie’s shelter, he had

his pot back over the fire. With his free hand, he passed each Confederate officer a small, flat packet. Rhoodie said, “Tear it, open and pour it into the bottom of your cup.” FOLGER’S INSTANT COFFEE, Lee read on the packet. Below that, in much smaller print, was something he could not make out. He put on his glasses. The words came clear: MADE IN U.S.A. He returned the glasses to his pocket, thinking he should have been able to guess that without reading it. As Rhoodie had directed, he poured the contents of the packet into his cup. The stuff did not look like ground coffee.

--------------

“I wonder how much the Bureau of Ordnance is paying for these—what did he call them?” “AK-47s,” Lee supplied. “Whatever the price, it may well mark the difference between our liberty and suppression. It would be difficult to set that price too high.” “Yes, sir.” Venable hesitated, then went on, “May I ask, sir, what you think of Mr. Rhoodie?” “Well, I certainly think a good deal better of him now that I know for a fact he is not a solitary charlatan with a solitary, if marvelous, carbine,” Lee said at once.

Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South 

WW1: “They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language?”

― Michael Morpurgo, War Horse

"How did it start?" he asks, and he does not sound like he especially wants to know but I tell him anyway because into every life, a little rain must fall.

"It is a student called Princip. He shoots the archduke. He shoots the archduchess. There is politics. A war ensues."

He looks at me, looks at my look, looks at his bag, opens his bag, looks in his bag, takes out a gun. He does not look as if he is about to use it.

Instead, he breaks it open. "Look!" he says, and I am looking already. "It hasn't been fired! How can Princip have laid his hands on another gun so quickly? The car went by thirty seconds after I stole this from his pocket.

He didn't have time! How is it possible?"

"May I ask," I asks, asking, "what you are trying to do with your time traveling and what you do when you have traveled time? Your motives are obscure, your methods abstruse, your results intangible."

"I'm trying to make things better. Isn't it obvious? I've tried to prevent the First World War.  "

-Jonathan L. Howard, “A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2015

WW2: “I came across an account of a young man named Kim Malthe-Bruun, who was eventually captured and executed by the Nazis when he was only twenty-one years old. I read his story as I had read many others, turning the pages, skimming here and there: this sabotage, that tactic, this capture, that escape. After a while even courage becomes routine to the reader. Then, quite unprepared, I turned the page and faced a photograph of Kim Malthe-Bruun. He wore a turtleneck sweater, and his thick, light hair was windblown. His eyes looked out at me, unwavering on the page. Seeing him there, so terribly young, broke my heart.”

― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

September 20 - Of course the first thing I looked for was the fire watch stone. And of course it wasn't there yet. It wasn't dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Reverend Dean Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940. I knew that. I went to see the fire watch stone only yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow help. It didn't.

The only things that would have helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little more time. I had not gotten either.

"Traveling in time is not like taking the tube, Mr Bartholomew," the esteemed Dunworthy had said, blinking at me through those antique spectacles of his. "Either you report on the twentieth or you don't go at all."

"But I'm not ready," I'd said. "Look, it too me four years to get ready to travel with St Paul. St Paul. Not St Paul's. You can't expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days."

"Yes," Dunworthy had said. "We can." End of conversation.

-Connie Willis, Fire Watch

Vietnam: “In the American Civil War it was a matter of principle that a good officer rode his horse as little as possible. There were sound reasons for this. If you are riding and your soldiers are marching, how can you judge how tired they are, how thirsty, how heavy their packs weigh on their shoulders? I applied the same philosophy in Vietnam, where every battalion commander had his own command-and-control helicopter. Some commanders used their helicopter as their personal mount. I never believed in that. You had to get on the ground with your troops to see and hear what was happening. You have to soak up firsthand information for your instincts to operate accurately. Besides, it’s too easy to be crisp, cool, and detached at 1, 500 feet; too easy to demand the impossible of your troops; too easy to make mistakes that are fatal only to those souls far below in the mud, the blood, and the confusion.”

― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

"We have someone replace you. "

"What?" he said again.

"Replace you. We can have someone go into the Army in your place, using your name. "

"Never heard of that. " Tom had heard of guys gaining fifty pounds or getting braces, plenty of other tricks.

"You're not supposed to know about it. Nobody in 1969 is supposed to know about it. These men come from the future, a couple hundred years from now. It's a better time, with no more wars. You have to believe that; it really can happen. " Her words had the fire of belief, like the Movement people.

Men had walked on the moon, and that was supposed to be science fiction. With nothing left to lose and no other options, Tom was ready to try it. "Why?" he asked.

"They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they're crazy. Our society up then thinks they're crazier than your society thinks you are. Sending them down now is a compromise, a way to let them do what they want to do, without hurting anyone up then. We hope they learn how bad war really is. "

-Jeff Hecht, “Draft Dodgers Rag” Analog, Mar 2004

Western

The beauty of fiction—well, one beauty, at least—is that it springs from personal imagination. Over time, as you shall see, Western fiction has been set in every state and territory from colonial New York to California and beyond. Tom Mix, the renowned cowboy star of 315 Hollywood films made between 1909 and 1935, once said, “The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it’s a state of mind. It’s whatever you want it to be.” In short, the possibilities are endless.

-Mike Newton, Writing Westerns: How to Craft Novels that Evoke the Spirit of the West .

Typical Western:  “He saw his enemies stealthily darting from rock to tree, and tree to bush, creeping through the brush, and slipping closer and closer every moment. On three sides were his hated foes and on the remaining side—the abyss. Without a moment's hesitation the intrepid Major spurred his horse at the precipice. Never shall I forget that thrilling moment. The three hundred savages were silent as they realized the Major's intention. Those in the fort watched with staring eyes. A few bounds and the noble steed reared high on his hind legs. Outlined by the clear blue sky the magnificent animal stood for one brief instant, his black mane flying in the wind, his head thrown up and his front hoofs pawing the air like Marcus Curtius' mailed steed of old, and then down with a crash, a cloud of dust, and the crackling of pine limbs.”

― Zane Grey, Betty Zane

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”

― Charles Portis, True Grit

Pioneer Western:  “As I squat to pee I look upward at the billions of stars and planets in the heavens and somehow my own insignificance no longer terrifies me as it once did, but comforts me, makes me feel a part, however tiny, of the whole complete and perfect universe. . . and when I die the wind will still blow and the stars still shine, for the place I occupy on earth is no more permanent than the water I now make, absorbed by the the sandy soil, dried instantly by the constant prairie wind . . .”

― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Weird West: Sacramento, California, 1851

 “Did you say you’re from Neptune?” said Caleb.

“Yep,” said the old man, and coughed. “The dark side.”

Caleb drew back the hammer of the rifle. “What? Where is Neptune?” said Crane, looking from the old slow man to Caleb and back to the man. “What is that?”

“It’s a planet,” said Caleb, gesturing heavenward with the barrel of the gun.

 “But this man ain’t from there. He’s from a drunk tank or an alleyway. He’s a tramp and a thief.”

 “No, sir,” said the old man. “I’m from Neptune, like I said. And I got a proposition for ya.”

-Ben H. Winters, The Old Slow Man and His Gold Gun From Space: Dead Man's Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West 

“In the Far West there is one thing which is more fabulously valuable then gold, even. And that is a story, whether it be truth or good, true-sounding fiction. Stories”

― Max Brand, The Max Brand Megapack

“William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, hunter, Indian-fighter and showman, joined the Pony Express – the West’s legendary mail service – at the age of fourteen, in response to an ad which ran: ‘WANTED young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 a week.”

― John Lloyd, The Noticeably Stouter Book of General Ignorance

Young Adult

 “As far as I can tell, a young-adult novel is a regular novel that people actually read.”

― Stephen Colbert

YA Classic: “He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that--it didn't work.”

...

 “And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.”

― Gary Paulsen, Hatchet

“You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.

...

You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”

― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

YA Non-Fantasy:  “The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

― John Green, Paper Towns

“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”

― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

YA Fantastic: “And that is how someone who is unusally susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies and the Seeing Things That Aren't Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end.”

― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“So . . . ," I said. "You're saying that by the end of our training, you expect us to be able to use grappling hooks made of energy to smash our enemies with flaming chunks of space debris?"

"Yes."

"That . . . ," I whispered, "that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.”

― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

YA lit is also different from fiction for grown-ups. There don’t seem to be as many Westerns. The romances are a little different. It’s not hard to find more gentle mysteries, though unlike mysteries for grown-ups, YA mysteries are a lot less likely to include  recipes for desserts. Less superficially, the tone of YA lit is often different: there’s less retrospection, less melancholy and nostalgia. Often, though not always, YA lit is more story-focused. All of this, I think, reflects the differences in the minds and lives of teens compared to adults.

One of the biggest differences in the landscape of YA lit is that there’s more genre-blending than in adult literature. It may be because teens’ literary tastes are still developing, while adults are more likely to have very particular reading habits, but I think it’s also because the newness of YA lit allows for innovation.

For all the flack they get, the Twilight books are a great example of genre-blending. They have vampires, but they’re not horror stories. And  the paranormal element is  only one aspect of the story: much of its appeal is in the romance of forbidden love. There’s also an  action element, featuring vampires versus werewolves (or good vampires versus evil vampires, or good vampires plus werewolves versus the vampire establishment).

-Gretchen Kolderup, Are You Reading YA Lit? You Should Be.

Libraries and Bookshops

“Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]”

― Isaac Asimov

“I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

― Ray Bradbury

bookshops are

time machines

spaceships

story-makers

secret-keepers

dragon-tamers

dream-catchers

fact-finders

& safe places.

-Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book 

“Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.”

― Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

 “At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube.”

― Myla Goldberg, The False Friend

“Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.”

― John Green

““I also work here because I love books, because I'm inveterately curious, and because, like most librarians, I'm not well suited to anything else. As a breed, we're the ultimate generalists. I'll never know everything about anything, but I'll know something about almost everything and that's how I like to live.”

A library is a miracle. A place where you can learn just about anything, for free. A place where your mind can come alive.”

― Josh Hanagarne, The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

 “In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder”

― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

I know at least three people who have personal libraries exceeding 30,000 books, which is roughly how many books are in your local branch library. How many of those have they read or will they read? Answer: only a small percentage.

There's no way to devote more than a few hours a day to reading. It would be optimistic to say any one of them could read (not skim) even two books a week. At that rate it would take each one 300 years to read all the books in his library. My guess is that none of them will be around that long.

So why do they have so many books? Why do people download 30,000 songs to their iPods or whatever? At 3 minutes per song, it would take 1,500 hours to listen to each song once, and most of those songs are dreck. So why do people collect them? I suppose it's because they can, and so with large personal libraries.

-Karl Keating

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.”

― Jerry Seinfeld

 “Because there is nothing I would rather do than rummage through bookshops, I went at once to Hastings & Sons Bookshop upon receiving your letter. I have gone to them for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted.”

― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Pickwick Bookshop was known in all the literary, educated circles   as the best bookstore west of the Mississippi. It had opened in 1938 and was an enormous three-story structure on Hollywood Boulevard that prided itself on the depth of its stock and almost supernaturally astute staff. Affectionately referred to as "The Big Bookshop," it was the place to browse, schmooze, and find books that no one else in town carried. Many of its customers were writers, artists, academics, and celebrities from all walks of life who knew that when they came to Pickwick, they would be treated with the utmost discretion and civility.

Despite the crappy wage, I considered myself a lucky girl to be working at such an extraordinary ordinary place. I loved it from the very first morning, when the staff gradually welcomed me from every corner of the store, emerging from behind bookcases and the rolling ladders attached to the walls for access to stock on the uppermost shelves. Some slid around from behind the long sales counter to greet me before counting the money in the cash drawers they'd just slipped into the registers.

To a soul, everyone was friendly and, to varying degrees, seemed to hold the potential for madness.

That day, I met the kind of people I'd been subconsciously waiting for all my life. Mad poets. Gay men. Hilarious alcoholics. Old queens and struggling actors; street hustlers and college dropouts. I shook hands with frustrated novelists and capricious astrologers. They all worked at Pickwick and would soon become my extended family.

-Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books 

Story

“If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending...

But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.

You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.”

― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”

― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”

― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

 “As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I've discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.”

― Myla Goldberg

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”

― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Stories that do not signal or illustrate a change in wisdom, growth or circumstance do not fulfill the basic requirements of a story worth telling.”

― Rob Parnell, The Writer & The Hero's Journey

“Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.”

― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

 “Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course, but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards -                  

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

The trouble was, September didn’t know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it were merry, she might dash after a Spoon, and it would all be a marvelous adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party with red lanterns at the end. But if it were a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving, with snow and arrows and enemies. Of course, we would like to tell her which. But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. That is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. -Steven Tyler

Reading

“The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.”

― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.

-Joan Aiken

“There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.”

― Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

 “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read.”

― Tom Clancy

Where do writers learn their best moves? They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading. They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do. But in their reading, they see something more. It’s as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses like the ones advertised years ago in comic books. This special vision allows them to see beneath the surface of the text. There they observe the machinery of making meaning, invisible to the rest of us. Through a form of reverse engineering, a good phrase used by scholar Steven Pinker, they see the moving parts, the strategies that create the effects we experience from the page—effects such as clarity, suspense, humor, epiphany, and pain. These working parts are then stored in the writer’s toolshed in boxes with names such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box—rhetoric.

-Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading 

 “When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read—with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature.”

― Andrew Clements

“I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction”

― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”

― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair,

forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger

- If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight,

because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early

- If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless

 – If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won’t understand what Bastian did next.

Staring at the title of the book, he turned hot and cold, cold and hot. Here was just what he had dreamed of, what he had longed for ever since the passion for books had taken hold of him:

A story that never ended! The book of books! He had to have this book

– at any price.

Michael Ende,  The Neverending Story 

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”

― Nora Ephron

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.

Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

― William Faulkner

“After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.”

― Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

“He held up a book then. “I'm going to read it to you to relax.”

“Does it have any sports in it?”

“Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders... Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”

“Sounds okay,” I said and I kind of closed my eyes.”

― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.”

― A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”

― Louis L'Amour

“Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?”

― Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see.”

― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.”

― Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”

― Daniel Pennac

“Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napkin, we look like, well, poets-unknown belletrists scraping through the hardscrabble years and awaiting the distinction that is imminent. the waiter of waitress refills our cup, we drop a memorable apothegm or two, share a laugh fraught with meaning, scope out the joint, and return to our tome. Nonbiblioholics strain to espy our title; conversation is struck up on things Kafkaesque and Kierkegaardian; and we forge a genuine biblioholic simpatico with all around.”

― Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.

-Jon Scieszka

 “That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”

― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”

― Lemony Snicket

“I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.”

― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.”

― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

 “I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”

― Anne Tyler

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

― Mark Twain

 “You should date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. 

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

― Rosemarie Urquico’

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

              

“I recommend readers to be adventurous and to try things they’ve never heard of or considered reading before. Get out of the comfort zone and discover something new and exciting. If you’d never be caught dead in the mystery section go and read some George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly or many others. If you only read thrillers get deep into the literary fiction aisle and let yourself be seduced. If you only read non-fiction pick up a Ian McDonald novel or a Joyce Carol Oates novel. If you only read comic books, get acquainted with the great Charles Dickens or a certain Monsieur Dumas. Pick up something at random and read a page. Feel the texture of the language, the architecture of the imagery, the perfume of the style… There’s so much beauty, intelligence and excitement to be had between the pages of the books waiting for you at your local bookstore the only thing you need to bring is an open mind and a sense of adventure. Disregard all prejudices, all pre-conceived notions and all the rubbish some people try to make you think. Think for yourself. Regarding books or anything in life. Think for yourself.”

― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“The words you can't find, you borrow.

We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”

― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Words

“He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.”

― Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese

“I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.”

― Chris Dee

“I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.”

― William Golding

“I'm pretty good at inventing phrases- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too...I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read them and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler vs. 500 words from Mark Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from Wilde. It’s wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of 1,000 words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words are worth.”

― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”

― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

“As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus.”

― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

 “With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.”

― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”

― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Writing 

Why do we sit down in our writing space, only to pop out of the chair to look for answers in the refrigerator, empty the dishwasher, check the mail, or get another book to use for research? Why do we have great ideas when we’re in the shower or driving on the freeway, then freeze and not know how to start when we get to our writing space?

Why do we distract ourselves with a multitude of other things to do and think about? Why do we paralyze ourselves with self-criticism and perfectionism? Why is it so damned hard to write?

-Rosanne Bane, Around the Writer's Block 

I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

-Dave Barry, Writing, Thinking, Fiction: www.writersdigest.com

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

― Ray Bradbury

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”

― Ray Bradbury

I am always dabbling in my current book, no matter the time or place, thinking about some aspect of the writing that I haven’t quite gotten right or executed well enough. It doesn’t command my entire attention, just enough of it that I seem constantly distracted. Various dilemmas and concerns steal me away. Sometimes it is a character that hasn’t been fully developed. Sometimes it is a plot element that just doesn’t fit quite the way it should. Sometimes it is something as mundane as a name that needs rethinking. Sometimes it is your basic insecurity attack; I just know that what I have written the day before is dreck and will have to be thrown out. Sometimes I am just thinking ahead to the next day’s writing and beginning to put the images together in my mind. But it is always something, as the saying goes. There is never a moment when I am not involved in thinking about writing. I can’t put it out of my mind entirely, even in the most trying of circumstances. You might as well ask me to stop breathing; thinking about my writing is as much a function of my life. So when my family and friends discover I am not listening to them or they catch me staring off into space, I can’t do a thing about it, because that’s just the way I am. It is the way all writers are, I suspect. The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can’t tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all. Some of this has to do with writers being observers. We don’t become involved so much as we watch and take notes. Much of what happens around us goes into a storage bin in our minds for future consideration and possible use in a book down the line. What we observe is as important to us in determining what we write as what we know. Frequently those annoying distractions we experience are just instances of recording our observations because we think they might suggest, on reflection, further writing possibilities.

-Terry Brooks, Sometimes the Magic Works 

“Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”

― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

You cannot become a terrific writer just—poof!—out of thin air. It takes something preexisting, some structural savvy, some foundation in technique, some underlying sense of the possibilities of language before you can strip off your topcoat and tap dance across the pages like Fred Astaire.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You too can imitate the greats, and in the process absorb elements of their style that will make your writing sing. The point is that the rhetorical device of imitation will help you grow as a writer, just as it helped Milton, Melville, Flaubert, Faulkner, Dickens, and Shakespeare. More importantly, you cannot expect to reach your full potential as a writer unless you learn to absorb from other writers by using the technique of imitation.

-William Cane, Fiction Writing Master Class: Emulating the Work of Great Novelists to Master the Fundamentals of Craft

Exciting opening action should result in bigger trouble for the protagonist, so why bog things down with a rambling back story? Use an ambush instead to hook readers. Then they will want to see what Princess Shequ does next. Can she make it out of the wilderness and find help before she dies of the venom festering in her wound? As you hook readers—drawing them in via exciting action and plenty of trouble for your characters—you will make them curious to learn more. Small snippets of background can be woven in from time to time —not too much, mind! Use just a little, here and there. A sentence or two of explanation is fine. At first, raise questions in a reader’s mind and pique his curiosity. Think of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and how the boy Elliot entices the alien from the dog house by placing pieces of candy on the ground. He spaces each one so that E.T. has to venture from hiding in order to pick them up. In a similar way, lure your readers into wanting to know the history or the background. Promise to explain later. Don’t bludgeon your audience at the start with what they’re not yet interested in receiving.

-Deborah Chester, The Fantasy Fiction Formula

“Writers possess only four tools: research, experience, empathy, and imagination. Fortunately, whole worlds can be built from them.”

― David Corbett, The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”

― Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

We’ve written tales on many things over the past few thousand years: stone tablets, ivory, tree bark, palm leaves... Historians have even discovered copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey written out on the dried skins of serpents. The Ancient Romans used the inner bark of trees to write on, a peel called liber, which in turn became the Latin word libri, meaning book, and subsequently livre, libro and library. The Ancient Greeks wrote on parchment, the Egyptians on papyrus; the Chinese invention of paper didn’t reach Europe for nearly a thousand years. In the Ancient world, most books were read out in public by would-be writers – the notion of silent reading came much later – and if an audience approved, it was likely that a patron would pay to have the author’s work copied out by slaves. Such patrons were the first publishers, and the book stalls they would set up near temples and in the food markets of central town squares were the first bookshops.

Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”

― Paulo Coelho

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”

― Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is...

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The secret to writing a novel is there is no secret. You write a novel by writing. You get better at writing novels by writing more novels.

Odds are the first time you baked a loaf of bread it was a disaster. And the first time you took a swing at a golf ball you may have missed the ball and tee completely. If you got better at either it’s because you didn’t retreat into the world of the theoretical (only reading recipes or only watching pro golfers on TV) but got back in the kitchen and back on the links and . . . Made a horrible batch of biscuits or shot an absolutely embarrassing round of golf. Until . . . You learned . . . by doing. What you’re doing now isn’t just writing a novel but also learning how to write a novel.

-Bill Dodds, How to Write Your Novel in Nine Weeks 

“When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.”

― Roger Ebert, Life Itself

Without exception everyone was born with creative ability. It is essential that people be given the opportunity to express themselves. If Balzac, De Maupassant, O. Henry, hadn’t learned to write, they might have become inveterate liars, instead of great writers. Every human being needs an outlet for his inborn creative talent. If you feel you would like to write, then write. Perhaps you are afraid that lack of a higher education might retard you from real accomplishment? Forget it. Many great writers, Shakespeare, Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, to mention a few, never saw the inside of a college. Even if you will never be a genius, your enjoyment of life can still be great.

-Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives .

“During the writing process you're going to discover things about yourself you never knew. For example, if you're writing about something that happened to you, you may re-experience some old feelings and emotions. You may get 'wacky' and irritable and live each day as if you were on an emotional roller coaster. Don't worry. Just keep writing.”

― Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

“There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.

The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?

The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.”

― Charles Finch

“How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.”

― Alice Weaver Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

― Gustave Flaubert

 “It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes

until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,

critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove

him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works

of genius?”

― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

Dear Neil, If you could choose a quote—either by you or another author—to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children’s area, what would it be? Thanks!

Lynn

Dear Lynn, I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, of why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned: “

…and then what happened?”

Neil

The four words that children ask, when you pause, telling them a story. The four words you hear at the end of a chapter. The four words, spoken or unspoken, that show you, as a storyteller, that people care. The joy of fiction, for some of us, is the joy of the imagination, set free from the world and able to imagine.

Neil Gaiman, Stories

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

― Nikki Giovanni

Your goal, as a storyteller, is to evoke the sense of wonder in your audience. You start by evoking the sense of wonder in yourself. Where one person is awestruck, others are also likely to be amazed. Think of it this way: Your own head is your test lab, so you have to wake up your own imagination first, drag it out of bed, force it outside, barefoot, shivering in its pajamas, to look up at the dark blazing sky. There is no better way to apply CPR to a snoozing imagination than by confronting it with a skyful of dazzling stars and a bright gibbous moon. Yes, you think you know what the sky looks like—but go outside and look at it again. It will surprise you. Every time. And in that moment of surprise, that’s when you are most alive. Your astonished intake of breath is you listening to the universe. Evoke that awe when you share the moment. Your job is to look for surprises in the world. And share them.

-David Gerrold, Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

“Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.”

― Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

 “Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”

― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Writing is mostly a mind game. It’s about tricking yourself into becoming who you are. If you do this long enough, you begin to believe it. And pretty soon, you start acting like it.”

― Jeff Goins, You Are A Writer

“I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.”

― Khaled Hosseini

 “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

― Jim Jarmusch ,[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”

Yes, e-books can be written and produced by anyone, including by millions who don't know how to join a subject to a predicate without committing a grammatical misdemeanor. That means there truly is a lot of dreck. But, over time, that dreck will sink to the bottom because few will part with ready cash for it, no matter how cheap the dreck may be offered.

-Karl Keating

 “Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them.”

― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

― Stephen King

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

In the brain, too, there is enormous variability. The kinds and numbers of cells in a given area are different inside every skull. Your brain is more individual than your fingerprints. Among the writers I have known, one habitually worked lying down in the dark, in a trailer with its windows painted black, dictating into a tape recorder. Another, when he wanted to think about a new novel, got on a bus to a destination about four hours away—it didn’t matter where. When he arrived, he boarded another bus and rode back; by the time he got home, he would have the novel all plotted out. Another meditated about a novel for three months, then sat down in a specially designed cubicle, smaller than a telephone booth, and typed furiously for thirty hours straight. When he came out, the novel was done. It follows that you must learn to write your own way, or you can never learn at all. I don’t mean that you can do whatever you please; you still have to communicate with the rest of us. I just mean that nobody can tell you exactly how to do it. “Here are the rules,” I say; but when you are skilled enough, you will certainly bend some of these rules and break others. “Writing talent” is not all one thing: it is a cluster of abilities—verbal facility, imagination, “storytelling ability,” sense of drama, of structure, of rhythm, and probably a lot of others that nobody has put a name to. You may have a great ear for dialogue, for instance, but be poor at visual description; or you may be weak at plotting but have a strong narrative sense. Your first job is to find out your strengths and weaknesses—many of the exercises in this book are designed to help you do so—and your second is to learn to get the most out of what you have.

-Damon Knight,   Creating Short Fiction 

 “But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.”

― Dean Koontz, Lightning

For the writers among us, the urge to communicate more clearly, more beautifully, and in new ways never really left us. With the right words, new worlds can be created, new ideas can be incubated and grown, great heights and depths can be reached. Every brilliant idea had its first home in the written or spoken word, and if you are a writer or aspire to be one, you most likely understand this

power better than anything. So, why write? Why be creative at all? Creativity is perhaps the most uniquely human characteristic, and it’s no exaggeration that many have linked it to the divine. Creativity is the ability to look out over the vista of of reality, and have the courage to wonder, “what if this was some other way?”

-Simeon Lindstrom, Creative Writing - From Think To Ink: Learn How To Unleash Your Creative Self and Discover Why You Don't Need 1000 Writing Prompts To Blast Away Your Writer's Block and Improve Your Writing Skills 

A writer is someone for whom writing is more

difficult than it is for other people. — THOMAS MANN

When a work of art is good, that’s partly because it’s unique. It’s part of art’s goodness that it feels creative, crisp, different. This is particularly true in storytelling. When a story feels new and different, it’s a sign it is working well. When stories fail, they tend to do so for all the same reasons, which make them feel beginnerish, derivative, and hackneyed. But getting a visual story to the ecstasy of “new” is a kind of agony for the writer. The task is complicated: The only sure way to make something feel really fresh and new is to use classical storytelling techniques that have been set in stone for thousands of years. It’s only by skillfully reaching backward that a writer can move his or her story forward. This is because story has a nature and a form that must be adhered to, or the thing created will not be a story. The challenge is to make something new using the existing form.

-Barbara Nicolosi, Notes to Screenwriters: Advancing Your Story, Screenplay, and Career With Whatever Hollywood Throws at You 

Stories are inside us waiting to be written. We may not know what they are, but we know something. If someone tells you—or you tell yourself—that two people are coming out of a building, you’ll find you know something, right away, about those two people. You won’t make decisions about them; you’ll see them in your mind’s eye. Maybe one is wearing a hat. Maybe one is laughing. When you ask questions about them, answers will slowly come. You must be patient and receptive. - Alice Mattison

-Sherry Ellis, Now Write! (Now Write! Series) 

 (2010-12-13T22:58:59). Now Write! Screenwriting (Now Write! Writing Guide Series) . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.”

― David Mamet

I spent months—was it years?—arranging and rearranging lists of several thousand titles. What classics were compelling enough to earn a spot? Which kids’ books so timeless they made the grade? What currents of thought retained their currency? Which life stories were larger than their protagonist’s life span? Not least, what authors did I love so much that they might be ushered in without their credentials being subject to too much scrutiny? My answers to all the above questions almost certainly will not be yours. Even where we agree, my description of a book might not highlight the things that have made you love it. A text is never static: Every sentence wends its way into the ear and mind of one reader differently than it is welcomed, or invites itself, into those of another. Just as a musician brings a score to life, so a reader animates an author’s pages; as Emerson said, “‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book.” And true readers talk and listen to one another, recommend and contend, make lists in the service of their search for another volume; it’s all part of the dance of serendipity and conversation that sweeps up all genuine book lovers time and again. Once people know you are writing a book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the way you did before. No matter how many books you’ve managed to consider, and no matter how many pages you’ve written, every conversation with a fellow reader is almost sure to provide new titles to seek out, or, more worryingly, to expose an egregious omission or a gap in your knowledge—to say nothing of revealing the privileges and prejudices, however unwitting, underlying your points of reference.

-James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

 “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

― Madeleine L'Engle

“If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”

― Louis L’Amour

 “I write fiction for lots of reasons. One is power. I'm in charge when I write. So are you. You create the world of the story. You make the rules.”

― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

BEYOND THE POWER of the pen, fiction writers wield the power of imagination, which has stirred the greatest passions and accomplishments that humanity has ever known. We tell stories. That’s all, you say. Yet, telling stories is at the core of being human. The past exists only in how we talk about it—to ourselves and others. The present exists in our moment-to-moment description of what is real, while the future is merely a set of stories we affirm, anticipate, or resist. Even so, few people would argue that a difference does exist between fiction and nonfiction, between the imaginative creation and our corporeal reality. In the hands of a master storyteller, the line between the two is, perhaps, inconsequential. Story can be every bit as powerful and life-altering as true life. The elixir of writing fiction for many of us is the undiluted freedom to project onto paper imagined people and events with the force of emotion we usually reserve for real life. The elixir, carried by a writer’s emotion, transfers to readers, placing them under a spell and carrying them away into a virtual world. Here, without risking death, danger, or transmutation, a reader can vicariously experience life’s worst and best, and what is physically impossible.

-Elizabeth Lyon, A Writer's Guide to Fiction (Writers Guide Series

There is nothing more nerve-racking than waiting as someone reads your writing. The reader becomes the videographer, zooming far, far into your heart and soul, unveiling every inch and corner. The writer remains a wary observer at the mercy of the reader, clueless as to how he might react. The writer is exposed, laid bare; her innermost thoughts and feelings are revealed in a potentially scathing moment of vulnerability.

-Gina. Marinello-Sweeney, I Thirst (The Veritas Chronicles Book 1)

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”

― George R.R. Martin

“Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliché, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.”

― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

― James Michener

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

― Joyce Carol Oates

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”

― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

― George Orwell, Why I Write

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”

― Edgar Allan Poe

The reader is not impressed that you managed to bang out this whole 90,000-word space opera in only three weeks (‘I was on a roll! I hardly slept!’) – the reader only cares whether your 90,000-word space opera is any good. It is no use addressing your imaginary reader with ‘Hey, maybe my book isn’t perfect, but you gotta understand the trials and tribulations I underwent writing it …’ Your girlfriend or boyfriend might conceivably care about that. Your friends may care. Your mother should care. But your readers have no obligation to forgive shoddy work because you happened to be going through a tough time writing it.

-Adam Roberts, Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

 “The writers are like the jazz musicians who give us a familiar melody at the opening of the piece so that we can understand the variations that follow. We do not listen for that melody. We listen for the variations”

-Thomas J. Roberts, An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction

“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”

― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

One day in an eighth-grade class we had a vocational-guidance session, during the course of which that teacher said to me, “I understand from your parents that you’re thinking of becoming a writer.” That was complete news to me. I stood there stunned, examining and reexamining the thought. A writer? Well, of course, I was writing all sorts of stories, always had, and I was the editor of the school paper, because I was always the editor of the school paper wherever I went to school, and I plainly had a way with words, and won spelling bees—but a writer? Someone who wrote for his living? That had never crossed my mind. Honestly. I was going to be a paleontologist, I thought, and spend my days out in Wyoming digging up dinosaurs. Or do something in botany, maybe. A writer? Did that make any sense? Well . . . maybe . . . I think the damage was done, right then and there, that afternoon in the eighth grade. If it seemed obvious to everybody but me that I was going to be a writer, why, maybe I should give the idea a little thought. By such glancing blows are our fates determined.

-Robert K Silverberg, Science Fiction: 101

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

― Sol Stein, Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

 “Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.”

― John Steinbeck

“Because liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“You can be near the cliché, you can dance around it, you can run right up to it and almost embrace it. But at the last second you must turn away.

You must give it a twist.”

― Blake Snyder, Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

“The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”

― William M. Thackeray

“When asked about rewriting, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that spontaneous eloquence seemed like a miracle and that he rewrote every word he ever published, and often several times. And Mark Strand, former poet laureate, says that each of his poems sometimes goes through forty to fifty drafts before it is finished.”

― Susan M. Tiberghien, One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer's Art and Craft

“Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.”

― Anne Tyler

“Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.”

― Jeff VanderMeer, Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

“I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.”

― Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers

“Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

― Kurt Vonnegut jr.

“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.”

― E.B. White, The Elements of Style

Readers don’t need to know the grass is green or that the sky is blue, but they do

need to know that the pub is to the left of the supermarket, just down the road from your character’s house. There needs to be an infrastructure to the world you are creating.  Give them a beauty that readers can picture. Tell us how dark the mahogany floor is.

-R.S Williams, How to Start Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: Bringing Ideas to Life

“Writing a book is a bit like surfing," he said. "Most of the time you're waiting. And it's quite pleasant, sitting in the water waiting. But you are expecting that the result of a storm over the horizon, in another time zone, usually, days old, will radiate out in the form of waves. And eventually, when they show up, you turn around and ride that energy to the shore. It's a lovely thing, feeling that momentum. If you're lucky, it's also about grace. As a writer, you roll up to the desk every day, and then you sit there, waiting, in the hope that something will come over the horizon. And then you turn around and ride it, in the form of a story.”

― Tim Winton

“Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?”

― Connie Willis, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”

― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

The piece of advice we writers often hear is this: Write What You Know. It is good advice. Until it’s not. This is true of all of the so-called “sacred cows” of writing advice—from Kill Your Darlings to Never Open Your Story With Weather to Don’t Use Adverbs Because Adverbs Eat Babies. They’re a good place to start but not always a great place to finish. They work well as guidelines, but far less as rigorous authorial gospel. If we give Write What You Know (aka WWYK) too much authority—too much weight as a supposed rule—we run the very likely risk of never actually writing anything interesting, because what we “know” as writers is often quite limited. Many of us write in the genre space, from science fiction to fantasy to horror, and we are automatically walled away from those genres if we interpret WWYK too literally. I’ve never ridden a dragon, henceforth, I should never write about riding a dragon. I’m not a robot from the future sent to kill the mother of the leader of a future human resistance movement, so how the hell could I write about it? Chased by a masked killer holding a bloodthirsty machete through the woods? Thankfully, no. So I guess I can’t write about it? The only thing I can write about is … Being a writer? Or worse, being a writer who is writing about writing? Ye gods, what a thrilling novel that would be. PAGE ONE: THE WRITER WRITES. Scribble, scribble. PAGE 300: THE WRITER IS ABOUT TO FINISH HIS MASTERPIECE ON THE SUBJECT OF A WRITER WRITING. It’s writers writing about writing all the way down. Ugggh.

-Chuck Wendig, (Forward) Putting the Science in Fiction

“Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.

A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.

Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.”

― Joy Williams

  Novellas: roughly 35,000–50,000 words. 

 Novelettes: 15,000–30,000 words. 

 Short stories: 2,000–10,000 words. 

 Short shorts: 1,500 words or less.

Karl Keating

January 3, 2015 ·

I know at least three people who have personal libraries exceeding 30,000 books, which is roughly how many books are in your local branch library. How many of those have they read or will they read? Answer: only a small percentage.

Keep in mind that their books are "serious" books, not fluff such as romance novels, which--as I understand it--can be read in multiple numbers per week, which was about how fast the late Barbara Cartland was said to have written hers.

No, the people I have in mind have "real" books in their libraries. Each fellow works full time. There's no way to devote more than a few hours a day to reading. It would be optimistic to say any one of them could read (not skim) even two books a week. At that rate it would take each one 300 years to read all the books in his library. My guess is that none of them will be around that long.

So why do they have so many books? Why do people download 30,000 songs to their iPods or whatever? At 3 minutes per song, it would take 1,500 hours to listen to each song once, and most of those songs are dreck. So why do people collect them? I suppose it's because they can, and so with large personal libraries.

It may have been James Gibbons, the nineteenth-century American cardinal, who said that in his whole life he had read only 100 books, but they were the world's 100 best books, and he read them over and over again. There's something to be said for that attitude.

What got me thinking about this is a post at the blog for the Booksellers Association of Canada: http://bookseller-association.blogspot.ca/…/simply-producin…

The blogger complains that too many books are being produced nowadays--particularly digital books. When the number of readers is growing arithmetically but the number of digital books is growing exponentially (or so it seems), there appears to be a glut. The blogger is worried that, just as bad money drives out the good, so bad books will drive out the good--or, at least, will cause them to be lost in a sea of dreck.

Maybe. On the other hand, the new arrangements are making it possible for good stuff that otherwise wouldn't appear in print, for whatever reason, to be published and discovered by people who couldn't discover it at all if it weren't available in some form.

Yes, e-books can be written and produced by anyone, including by millions who don't know how to join a subject to a predicate without committing a grammatical misdemeanor. That means there truly is a lot of dreck. But, over time, that dreck will sink to the bottom because few will part with ready cash for it, no matter how cheap the dreck may be offered.

I'm not a neutral observer. I uploaded an e-book a few weeks ago ("No Apology": see posts below), and this month I expect to upload two or three more. It's an experiment, to see what is possible in a market where there supposedly are already too many books.

Kevin Aldrich I have that many books in my library. I call it the Internet!

Cathy Cruz I just purchased four bookcases this summer so this applies to me. Not including the 360 or so I have on my tablet.

1. "Who has disposable income for books, when they can barely pay their utilities and medical costs (esp. post-Obamacare)?" This may reflect your personal situation and that of people close to you, but it isn't the case in general. In the U.S., people are buying more books than ever. Even if some Catholics are buying fewer books, the question you ought to address is "Why aren't they buying mine?"

2. When writing of the slow sales of your sola scriptura book, you say, "I would say it is primarily the tiny market and the economy, that explains it." Again, I disagree. Even though my "Catholicism and Fundamentalism" (which covers sola scriptura too) has been out for almost 27 years now, it still sells thousands of copies each year. (Even though it has the same unattractive cover it began with.) C&F has sold more than 200,000 copies, so I don't think we can say that market is tiny. Sure, it's not like the market for novels or for many non-fiction areas, but it's been big enough to absorb C&F.

I think you need to get past the "tiny market" argument and the "everyone's broke" argument. They're obscuring your vision. You need to look more arm's length at why you haven't had the success you hoped for, even though you probably have written more orthodox Catholic books than anyone out there today.

Karl Keating Dave: Let me make two observations on things you've said.

1. "Who has disposable income for books, when they can barely pay their utilities and medical costs (esp. post-Obamacare)?" This may reflect your personal situation and that of people close to you, but it isn't the case in general. In the U.S., people are buying more books than ever. Even if some Catholics are buying fewer books, the question you ought to address is "Why aren't they buying mine?"

2. When writing of the slow sales of your sola scriptura book, you say, "I would say it is primarily the tiny market and the economy, that explains it." Again, I disagree. Even though my "Catholicism and Fundamentalism" (which covers sola scriptura too) has been out for almost 27 years now, it still sells thousands of copies each year. (Even though it has the same unattractive cover it began with.) C&F has sold more than 200,000 copies, so I don't think we can say that market is tiny. Sure, it's not like the market for novels or for many non-fiction areas, but it's been big enough to absorb C&F.

I think you need to get past the "tiny market" argument and the "everyone's broke" argument. They're obscuring your vision. You need to look more arm's length at why you haven't had the success you hoped for, even though you probably have written more orthodox Catholic books than anyone out there today.

1.            Romance: The Last Song is a 2009 novel by American author Nicholas Sparks.

2.            Mystery: Dorothy L. Sayers

3.            Western: The Man from Skibbereen

4.            Thriller: David Baldacci  Camel Club/Wish You Well

5.            Drama: The Long Valley (1938)

6.            Memoir/Humorous: The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

7.            Horror: The Elementals Kindle Edition  by Michael McDowell

8.            Amish: Fallen in Plain Sight Kindle Edition  by Marta Perry (Author)

9.            Fantasy: The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart (Tales from the Chocolate Heart #1) by Stephanie Burgis

10.         Science Fiction: The High Crusade

11.         Travel/humorous Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks

12.         Nonfiction: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read  by Pierre Bayard, Jeffrey Mehlman (Translator)

https://www.bookish.com/articles/intro-to-amish-fiction-five-authors-to-check-out/

https://www.listchallenges.com/the-50-best-short-stories-of-all-time

https://www.everywritersresource.com/1000-greatest-short-stories-time/

https://bookriot.com/2018/02/23/short-mystery-stories/

https://www.tor.com/2013/05/24/three-short-stories-with-stranded-time-travellers/

https://bookriot.com/2018/03/12/contemporary-short-story-collections/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/books/short-story-collections/mystery-crime-short-stories/_/N-29Z8q8Z1xxg

https://www.standoutbooks.com/john-steinbeck-writing-advice/

Unwritten

http://www.authorcagray.com/books/

The Language of Flowers

by Tara Gilboy

Bibliomysteries : crime in the world of books and bookstores / edited by Otto Penzler

David Sedaris

The Amy Binegar-Kimmes-Lyle Book of Failures: A funny memoir of missteps, inadequacies and faux pas Kindle Edition

by Amy Lyle

Karen Kingsbury

The Sun Is Also a Star

The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love

https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/the-50-greatest-adventure-books-20141106/a-cooks-tour-by-anthony-bourdain/

The Secret of a Heart Note

The Geography of You and Me

The Enlightenment of Bees  Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Rachel Linden (

https://hiconsumption.com/best-adventure-books/

https://books.google.com/books?id=UNnhbq9gwTUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bring+em+back+alive&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=eXcHTvbDHs7qgQeptPHoDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biggles

Welcome to Danvers

Flipped (2001)

 https://curricublog.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/0019/

Confessions of a Serial Kisser (2008)

The Bookshop Book Oct 2, 2014

by Jen Campbell

The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller

by Betsy Burton

Beautiful Chaos Kindle Edition

by Alex Tully

The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller

by Betsy Burton

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

by Wendy Werris

Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

by Tom Raabe

tags: biblioholism, book, reading, restaurant

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“The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast-- unaccountable headwinds by night-- and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. 'Try a piece of this, old cock,' he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. 'It might put a little heart into you.' The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.

― Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise

BiographyMemoir

Children's

Christian

Classics

Contemporary

Crime

Ebooks

Fantasy  Paranormal

Fiction

Gay and Lesbian

Historical Fiction

Horror

Humor and Comedy

Mystery

Nonfiction

Comics

Graphic Novels

Manga

Art

Business

Cookbooks

Music

History

Philosophy

Psychology

Science

Sports

Poetry

ReligionSpirituality

Romance  Chick Lit

Science Fiction

Self Help

Thriller/Suspense

Travel

Young Adult

“When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.

And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.

I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”

― Neil Gaiman

Education

Current Events and Politics

Religious Studies

Self-Help/Inspirational

“Habit 1: Be Proactive

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind

Habit 3: Put First Things First

Habit 4: Think Win/Win

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Habit 6: Synergize

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw”

― Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The big book of adventure stories : the most complete volume of adventure stories ever published / edited and with a introduction by Otto Penzler ; foreword by Doug Preston

 BOOK | Vintage Books | 2011.

Available at LEXINGTON/Adult (FICTION BIG)

 Request it

Additional actions:

The Oxford Book of Adventure Stories

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is structured around ten main classes covering the entire world of knowledge; each main class is further structured into ten hierarchical divisions, each having ten sections of increasing specificity.[1] As a system of library classification the DDC is "arranged by discipline, not subject", so a topic like clothing is classed based on its disciplinary treatment (psychological influence of clothing at 155.95, customs associated with clothing at 391, and fashion design of clothing at 746.92) within the conceptual framework.[2] The list below presents the ten main classes, hundred divisions, and thousand sections.[3]

  https://cmrls.lib.ms.us/digital-library/virtual-reference-collection/ddc-website-links/dewey-decimal-subject-list

https://doingdeweydecimal.com/dewey-decimal-directory/

Contents

•             1Class 000 – Computer science, information & general works

•             2Class 100 – Philosophy & psychology

•             3Class 200 – Religion

•             4Class 300 – Social sciences

•             5Class 400 – Language

•             6Class 500 – Science

•             7Class 600 – Technology

•             8Class 700 – Arts & recreation

•             9Class 800 – Literature

•             10Class 900 – History & geography

 Misc. Non-Fiction Variety

Good nonfiction writing is, largely, about the conviction of one’s impressions. Your honest “take” on the world. I often tell my students to mind not only the details, but, in particular, the weird details. But there is much truth in the strange; sometimes it’s the only way to reassess the ordinary. Of course, it’s frightening to risk the truth, mainly for fear that somebody might read what we’ve written and take it badly or, worse, think badly of us—that our observations and hard-won insights are bizarre or creepy. That’s why, to really get the ink flowing, I often console myself with the morbid thought that, in all likelihood, when I die nobody’s gonna remember me, so why the hell not write what’s true? -Jay Kirk

-Sherry Ellis, Now Write! Nonfiction (Now Write! Series)

The banner of the magazine I’m proud to have founded and I continue to edit, Creative Nonfiction, defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as “true stories well told.” And that, in essence, is what creative nonfiction is all about. In some ways, creative nonfiction is like jazz—it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, and techniques, some of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself. Creative nonfiction can be an essay, a journal article, a research paper, a memoir, or a poem; it can be personal or not, or it can be all of these. The words “creative” and “nonfiction” describe the form. The word “creative” refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction—factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy. But the stories are true. The word “creative” has been criticized in this context because some people have maintained that being creative means that you pretend or exaggerate or make up facts and embellish details. This is completely incorrect. It is possible to be honest and straightforward and brilliant and creative at the same time. Albert Einstein, Jacques Cousteau, Stephen Hawking, and Abraham Lincoln are just a few of the brilliant leaders and thinkers who wrote truthful, accurate, and factual material—and were among the most imaginative and creative writers of their time and ours. The word “creative” in creative nonfiction has to do with how the writer conceives ideas, summarizes situations, defines personalities, describes places—and shapes and presents information. “Creative” doesn’t mean inventing what didn’t happen, reporting and describing what wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that the writer has a license to lie. The word “nonfiction” means the material is true. The cardinal rule is clear—and cannot be violated. This is the pledge the writer makes to the reader—the maxim we live by, the anchor of creative nonfiction: “You can’t make this stuff up!”

-Lee Gutkind, You Can't Make This Stuff Up 

“The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.”

― Nick Hornby

001.9     Mysterious World Unexplained, UFO’s, Bigfoot, etc. 

Mysterious (mist·ris), a. [f. L. mysterium MYSTERY1 + OUS. Cf. F. mystérieux.] 1. Full of or fraught with mystery; wrapt in mystery; hidden from human knowledge or understanding; impossible or difficult to explain, solve, or discover; of obscure origin, nature, or purpose.

-Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman.

Ancient Egypt was a unique culture whose magic reaches down the millennia to us through words such as mummies, pyramids, the Sphinx, Tutankhamun, pharaohs, and curses. Few Egyptologists are able to use adventures and secrets from the realm of the pharaohs to capture people’s hearts. Bob Brier is one of them. Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 initiated the modern era of Egyptomania: We can say that Bonaparte, Vivant Denon (the head of his scientific team), and others discovered ancient Egypt for everyone. The publication of the Description de l’Égypte and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone can be thought of as the keys that opened the door for the world to understand the land of the pharaohs. Zahi Hawass Cairo, March 2013

-Bob Brier, . Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs

Area 51 is a riddle. Very few people comprehend what goes on there, and millions want to know. To many, Area 51 represents the Shangri-la of advanced espionage and war fighting systems. To others it is the underworld of aliens and captured UFOs. The truth is that America’s most famous secret federal facility was set up in order to advance military science and technology faster and further than any other foreign power’s in the world. Why it is hidden from the world in southern Nevada’s high desert within a ring of mountain ranges is the nexus of the riddle of Area 51.

-Annie Jacobsen, Area 51

“In this book, therefore, I divide the things that are “impossible” into three categories. The first are what I call Class I impossibilities. These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics. So they might be possible in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form. They include teleportation, antimatter engines, certain forms of telepathy, psychokinesis, and invisibility. The second category is what I term Class II impossibilities. These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all, they might be realized on a scale of millennia to millions of years in the future. They include time machines, the possibility of hyperspace travel, and travel through wormholes. The final category is what I call Class III impossibilities. These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics. Surprisingly, there are very few such impossible technologies. If they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.”

― Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

“In the future, an adventurous sociologist might consider writing a paper that examines the “caste” system in anomalies research. The “nuts and bolts” UFO research people regard the “psychosocial” UFO researchers with disdain. UFO researchers in general regard the cryptozoologists with contempt. Cryptozoologists who embrace the possibility of a paranormal connection to Bigfoot sightings are generally viewed with derision because of the prevailing view that Sasquatch is an undiscovered primate species, not an interdimensional playmate of alien beings. Likewise, the paranormal researchers view the UFO researchers with disdain, while the ghost hunters keep their distance from everybody else. And all of this hostility and contempt is a vain and so far unsuccessful attempt to earn a small measure of respect and acceptance (and maybe funding) from mainstream science, a lofty but unlikely goal.”

― Colm A. Kelleher, Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah

In one of his published scientific articles, Morse had presented a number of the children’s NDEs. For example, an eight-year-old boy who’d almost drowned after his parents’ car had swerved off an icy road into a river in Washington had reported: “I could see the car filling up with water, and it covered me all up. Then everything went blank. Suddenly I was floating in the air. I felt like I could swim in the air.” He was very surprised to still be thinking, as he knew he must have died. He continued, “Then I floated into the huge noodle. Well, I thought it was a noodle, but maybe it was a tunnel. Yeah, it must have been a tunnel because a noodle doesn’t have a rainbow in it.” A five-year-old girl whose heart had stopped had reported: “I rose up in the air and saw a man like Jesus, because he was nice and he was talking to me. I saw dead people, grandmas and grandpas, and babies waiting to be born. I saw a light like a rainbow, which told me who I was and where I should go. Jesus told me it wasn’t my time to die.”

-Sam Parnia, What Happens When We Die?

004 – 006            Computer Science

Just as designing algorithms for computers was originally a subject that fell into the cracks between disciplines—an odd hybrid of mathematics and engineering—so, too, designing algorithms for humans is a topic that doesn’t have a natural disciplinary home. Today, algorithm design draws not only on computer science, math, and engineering but on kindred fields like statistics and operations research. And as we consider how algorithms designed for machines might relate to human minds, we also need to look to cognitive science, psychology, economics, and beyond.

-Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By

010 Bibliographies

020 Library & information sciences

030 Encyclopedias & books of facts

040 Unassigned (formerly Biographies)

050 Magazines, journals & serials

060 Associations, organizations & museums

070 Journalism/News

About Journalism: 

“We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.”

― Dave Barry

“Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

― G.K. Chesterton

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.     

-Marguerite Duras

As anthropologists began comparing notes on the world’s few remaining primitive cultures, they discovered something unexpected. From the most isolated tribal societies in Africa to the most distant islands in the Pacific, people shared essentially the same definition of what is news. They shared the same kind of gossip. They even looked for the same qualities in the messengers they picked to gather and deliver their news. They wanted people who could run swiftly over the next hill, accurately gather information, and engagingly retell it. Historians have pieced together that the same basic news values have held constant through time. “Humans have exchanged a similar mix of news . . . throughout history and across cultures,” historian Mitchell Stephens has written.

-Bill Kovach, The Elements of Journalism 

Real Life Journalism:

 “June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers.

― Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men

“literally: This word should be deleted. All too often, actions described as “literally” did not happen at all. As in, “He literally jumped out of his skin.” No, he did not. Though if he literally had, I’d suggest raising the element and proposing the piece for page one. Inserting “literally” willy-nilly reinforces the notion that breathless nitwits lurk within this newsroom. Eliminate on sight—the usage, not the nitwits. The nitwits are to be captured”

― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

Fictional Journalism/News

“After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.”

― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870

CAPTAIN KIDD LAID out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment. He had been born in 1798 and the third war of his lifetime had ended five years ago and he hoped never to see another but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself. Still he stayed his rounds, even during the cold spring rains. He had been at one time a printer but the war had taken his press and everything else, the economy of the Confederacy had fallen apart even before the surrender and so he now made his living in this drifting from one town to another in North Texas with his newspapers and journals in a waterproof portfolio and his coat collar turned up against the weather. He rode a very good horse and was concerned that someone might try to take the horse from him but so far so good. So he had arrived in Wichita Falls on February 26 and tacked up his posters and put on his reading clothes in the stable. There was a hard rain outside and it was noisy but he had a good strong voice. He shook out the Journal’s pages.

-Paulette Jiles, News of the World 

"As Harry and Ron rounded the clump of trees behind which Harry had first heard the dragons roar, a witch leapt out from behind them.

It was Rita Skeeter. She was wearing acid-green robes today; the Quick-Quotes Quill in her hand blended perfectly against them.

"Congratulations, Harry!' she said beaming at him. "I wonder if you could give me a quick word? How you felt facing that dragon? How do you feel now about the fairness of the scoring?"

"Yeah, you can have a word," said Harry savagely. "Goodbye!"

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))

080 Quotations

090 Manuscripts & rare books

100 Philosophy:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Pythagoras is in fact credited with having coined the words "philosophy" ("love of wisdom") and "mathematics" ("that which is learned"). To him, a "philosopher" was someone who "gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself...to uncover the secrets of nature." Pythagoras emphasized the importance of learning above all other activities, because, in his words, "most men and women, by birth or nature, lack the means to advance in wealth and power, but all have the ability to advance in knowledge.”

― Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number

“You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).”

― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“To be is to do - Socrates

To do is to be - Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra”

― Kurt Vonnegut

110 Metaphysics

Metaphysics, according to Aristotle, is an investigation into the different kinds or categories of being. To understand what he had in mind, it is helpful to know that, as Aristotle saw things, terms like “being” or “existence” have a variety of different meanings. For example, what it is for a horse to exist is very different Aristotle’s idea was that “being” and related words (like “is” or “exists”) mean one thing when predicated of a horse or a cat and something else when predicated of a number. The meanings are related to one another, but still different. We can understand this point by way of an analogy. Consider the word “healthy.” We might say that a meal is healthy; we might also say that someone’s complexion is healthy, or that she herself is healthy. It seems that “healthy” means something different in each of these three cases. The meanings are related, but they are still different. So, likewise, Aristotle thought, with words like “exists” or “is”: They too vary in meaning, depending on the sort of thing to which they are applied.

-Michael Rea, Metaphysics: The Basics 

120 Epistemology

The official name for the study of knowledge in philosophy is epistemology. The word ‘epistemological’ means pertaining to the study of knowledge; while ‘epistemic’ means pertaining to knowledge.

The noun ‘knowledge’ and the verb ‘to know’ are used in a large variety of ways. The Oxford English Dictionary devotes almost 2600 words to defining various senses and constructions involving the verb (not including hundreds of examples). It’s difficult to sort all this out, but we can roughly distinguish three main kinds of ways of knowing, corresponding to three sorts of things said to be known: 1  Knowledge of facts (for example, Fred knows that the party is cancelled). We’ll call this knowing-that. 2  Knowledge of a thing or person (for example, I know Sally; Irving knows every song the Beatles recorded). We’ll call this knowing-him/her/it. 3  Knowledge how to do something (for example, Zelda knows how to string a guitar). We’ll call this knowing-how.

-Robert M Martin, Epistemology: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides) .

130 Parapsychology & occultism

With few exceptions, scientists have always been disdainful of accounts of the paranormal and the idea of studying it rigorously. But there was a moment when science discovered a kaleidoscope of invisible forces, waves, and particles underneath a now thinner veil of reality, and that the universe is expanding. At that moment there was just enough give in the scientific community that phenomena that had always been dismissed as paranormal could be approached differently. In this brief window of opportunity, Duke University opened the Parapsychology Laboratory. I’d heard of the lab over the years, but when I went down to North Carolina I had little idea of what went on there.

The men and women of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory were scientists. They never would have phrased it this way. But when all is said and done, as they tried to prove that death is not the end, what they were really trying to prove is that love lasts forever. The problem was how to scientifically demonstrate that life and all the feelings that go with it survive death. A medium relaying messages of continuing love from a dead wife might be enough for an inconsolable widower, but it would never be enough for the scientific community, which demanded not only more convincing evidence but also experiments that could be reliably repeated to produce consistent results. To move an idea out of the realm of belief and into the world of accepted fact, others must be able to verify your results. There are no shortcuts to this process, and no exceptions. Like those we pray to when death is imminent, the scientific method is immune to longing, hope, and pleas.

-Stacy Horn, Unbelievable 

150 Psychology:

“The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.”

― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

 “If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”

― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

158 Self-Help/Inspiration:

 “I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.”

― George Carlin

Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be a part of the solution, not the problem.

-Stephen R. Covey “Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People: Living THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE Every Day”

“What would you do if you weren't afraid?”

― Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?

“Making my bed correctly was not going to be an opportunity for praise. It was expected of me. It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task.”

― William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

160 Philosophical logic

“Logic does not generate new truths, but rather allows one to evaluate existing chains of thought for consistency and coherence. It is precisely for that reason that it proves an effective tool for the analysis and communication of ideas and arguments.

The ability to analyze others’ arguments can also serve as a yardstick for when to withdraw from discussions that will most likely be futile.”

― Ali Almossawi, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

The modern world is a noxious environment for those of us bothered by logical error. People may have become no worse at reasoning, but they now have so many more opportunities to show off how bad they are. If anyone cared about our suffering, talk radio and oped pages would be censored. Even Congress is now broadcast, as if no torment were too great.

Alas, most know next to nothing about the ways reasoning can go wrong. Schools and universities pack their minds with invaluable pieces of information—about the nitrogen cycle, the causes of World War II, iambic pentameter, and trigonometry—but leave them incapable of identifying even basic errors of logic. Which makes for a nation of suckers, unable to resist the bogus reasoning of those who want something from them, such as votes or money or devotion.

-Jamie Whyte, Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders 

170 Ethics

Ethics are arguably the one type of philosophy that is readily applicable to daily life. Philosophy asks big questions like, “Is God real?” or “Why are we here?” But those big questions don’t directly address how to live one’s life. Ethics is the missing step between addressing the infiniteness of the universe and reconciling it with the daily existence of life on earth. If philosophy encourages moral behavior by asking the big “why” questions, then ethics is an exploration of that moral behavior, and it seeks to formulate concrete “what” and “how” answers to the questions that philosophy poses.

-Brian Boone, Ethics 101: From Altruism and Utilitarianism to Bioethics and Political Ethics, an Exploration of the Concepts of Right and Wrong (Adams 101) 

200 Religion:

200.92 Saints

Saints are not freaks or exceptions.  They are the standard operating model for human beings.  In fact, in the biblical sense of the word, all believers are saints.  "Sanctity" means holiness.  All men, women and children, born or unborn, beautiful or ugly, straight or gay, are holy, for they bear the image of God.

-Peter Kreeft

From Saints Writings

 “And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”

― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us!

- St Teresa of Ávila

“When you speak of your neighbor, look upon your tongue as a sharp razor in the surgeon’s hand, about to cut nerves and tendons; it should be used so carefully, as to insure that no particle more or less than the truth be said.”

― Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

“I saw that every flower He has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily’s whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy’s charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would be no longer enameled with their varied flowers.”

― Thérèse de Lisieux, The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of the Little Flower

Biographies: The shadow approached Joan slowly; the extremity of it reached her, flowed over her, clothed her in its awful splendor. In that immortal light her face, only humanly beautiful before, became divine; flooded with that transforming glory her mean peasant habit was become like to the raiment of the sun-clothed children of God as we see them thronging the terraces of the Throne in our dreams and imaginings.

Presently she rose and stood, with her head still bowed a little, and with her arms down and the ends of her fingers lightly laced together in front of her; and standing so, all drenched with that wonderful light, and yet apparently not knowing it, she seemed to listen—but I heard nothing. After a little she raised her head, and looked up as one might look up toward the face of a giant, and then clasped her hands and lifted them high, imploringly, and began to plead. I heard some of the words. I heard her say:

“But I am so young! oh, so young to leave my mother and my home and go out into the strange world to undertake a thing so great! Ah, how can I talk with men, be comrade with men?—soldiers! It would give me over to insult, and rude usage, and contempt. How can I go to the great wars, and lead armies?—I a girl, and ignorant of such things, knowing nothing of arms, nor how to mount a horse, nor ride it.... Yet—if it is commanded—”

Her voice sank a little, and was broken by sobs, and I made out no more of her words. Then I came to myself. I reflected that I had been intruding upon a mystery of God—and what might my punishment be? I was afraid, and went deeper into the wood. Then I carved a mark in the bark of a tree, saying to myself, it may be that I am dreaming and have not seen this vision at all. I will come again, when I know that I am awake and not dreaming, and see if this mark is still here; then I shall know. ― Mark Twain, Joan of Arc

Saintly Fiction: “Look, friend, you could do me a very great favor. You see, I have a brother at Monte Cassino… he’s only a boy, no more than fifteen. My youngest brother. He’s been a Benedictine oblate ever since he was five. When you take the place…will you keep an eye on him and see that he doesn’t get hurt?”

               “Most certainly I will , if I can”, said Piers warmly. “But how shall I recognize him?”

               The young poet laughed again. “You can’t miss him. He is a very fat boy, surely the fattest of the lot. Ah, but you don’t know his name, of course.  I haven’t introduced myself. I am Count Rainald of Aquino, and my little brother’s name is Thomas… Thomas of Aquino.”

- Louis de Wohl, The Quiet Light: A Novel of St. Thomas Aquinas

Fictional Saints: They canonized him eventually, of course—there was no question that he’d died for the Faith. But the miracles started right away. In Paris, a computer programmer with a very tricky program knew it was almost guaranteed to hang. But he prayed to Father Vidicon to put in a good word for him with the Lord, and the program ran without a hitch. Art Rolineux, directing coverage of the Super Bowl, had eleven of his twelve cameras die on him, and the twelfth started blooming. He sent up a quick prayer to Father Vidicon, and five cameras came back on-line. Ground Control was tracking a newly-launched satellite when it suddenly disappeared from their screens. “Father Vidicon, protect us from Finagle!” a controller cried out, and the blip reappeared. Miracles? Hard to prove—it could’ve been coincidence. It always can, with electronic equipment. But as the years flowed by, engineers and computer programmers and technicians all over the world began counting the prayers, and the numbers of projects and programs saved—and word got around, as it always does. So the day after the Pope declared him to be a saint, the signs went up on the back wall of every computer room and control booth in the world: “St. Vidicon of Cathode, pray for us!”

-Christopher Stasheff, Saint Vidicon To The Rescue

About Many Saints: Of course, it may sound strange to think of yourself drinking with the faithful departed, and yes, perhaps it is ironic that we are toasting to and drinking with the saints, some of whom were renowned for their extraordinary self-denial. Yet even John the Baptist, who drank “neither wine nor strong drink” (Lk. 1: 15), is now rejoicing at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. And if Cana is any indication of Our Divine Bridegroom’s preferences, you can be sure that the celestial vintage is being enjoyed by all. And so to those already at the Wedding Feast, Orate pro nobis, and to those still on pilgrimage here below, Prosit!

-Michael P Foley, Drinking with the Saints: The Sinner's Guide to a Holy Happy Hour

Maria Morera Johnson, a college professor with degrees in literature and education, is a self-declared fan of the sci-fi and superhero genres. She knows how to tell a good story, yet My Badass Book of Saints: Courageous Women Who Showed Me How to Live proves she knows truth from fiction. Her stories describe real-life women who faced down outlaws in the Old West, genocide in Rwanda, convicts in a Tijuana prison, and oppressive regimes in Europe and Cuba. Maria also chronicles canonized saints, both well-known and obscure. Their strength, verve, and feminine genius may raise an eyebrow or two, but their powerful witness will inspire women seeking ways to live out a strong and uncompromising faith in a dangerous world.

-Maria Morera Johnson, My Badass Book of Saints

Legends and Children’s Stories: ‘Damian, who do you admire?’

I said, ‘St Roch, sir.’

The others stopped talking.

‘Who does he play for?’

‘No one, sir. He’s a saint.’

The others went back to football.

‘He caught the plague and hid in the woods so he wouldn’t infect anyone, and a dog came and fed him every day. Then he started to do miraculous cures and people came to see him – hundreds of people – in his hut in the woods. He was so worried about saying the wrong thing to someone that he didn’t say a word for the last ten years of his life.’ ‘

We could do with a few like him in this class. Thank you, Damian.’ ‘

He’s the patron saint of plague, cholera and skin complaints. While alive, he performed many wonders.’ ‘Well, you learn something new.’

-Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Millions

220 Bible

Suddenly the fingers of a man's hand emerged and began writing opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, and the king saw the back of the hand that did the writing. Then the king's face grew pale and his thoughts alarmed him, and his hip joints went slack and his knees began knocking together. Daniel 5: 5-6 NASV

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. John 21: 25 NIV

About the Bible:

“The Bible, of course, for aside from religion there is much to be learned of men and their ways in the Bible. It is also a source of comments made of references and figures of speech. No man could consider himself educated without some knowledge of it.”

― Louis L'Amour, To the Far Blue Mountains

“These books can't possibly compete with centuries of established history, especially when that history is endorsed by the ultimate bestseller of all time."

Faukman's eyes went wide. "Don't tell me Harry Potter is actually about the Holy Grail."

"I was referring to the Bible."

Faukman cringed. "I knew that.”

― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

“I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing.”

― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teaching were removed.”

― Teddy Roosevelt

Biblical Fiction: And now he knew that he must make sure, absolutely sure that the man was dead. He beckoned to the soldier to whom he had spoken. The fellow came, reluctantly.

“Give me your spear,” Cassius said roughly.

The man obeyed. His hands were trembling. No use letting him try; he’d only botch it. It was a regulation six-foot spear, the blade almost two inches wide and near the shaft a little over half an inch thick.

Cassius weighed it in his hands to get the feel of it and then tightened his grip. Raising the spear with both hands, he thrust it with all his strength forward and up, through the crucified man’s heart.

For one split moment he thought that he had been hit by a bolt of lightning. Everything around him lighten up with terrifying clarity, and he saw the long, lean body, pale and golden, with its arms outstretched as if to embrace him, and his spear entering it. He heard the thud, and he felt the resistance, either of the body or of the wood of the cross behind it.

Then it was night again, a dark-red night splashing all over him and blinding him completely, and he staggered and would have fallen if he had not held on to the spear in the crucified man’s heart.

Blood. He was full of blood. The whole world was full of blood.  He was suffocating in it.

From far, far, away came the sound of crying. The world was crying.

He wiped the blood from his face.

It was still day. The sun had broken through the clouds just as he had thrust in the spear, and for one moment he had seen clearly, for that one moment. Then darkness again… It had not been lightning but the sun.

The long, lean body hung before him, pale and golden, with its arms outstretched, as if to embrace him. The head with the crown of thorns had sunk on the chest.

-Louis DeWohl, The Spear

Biblical Science Fiction: You know what happened and how it happened. We will arrive on the day that Pilate asks the inhabitants of Jerusalem whom he should set free, as the citizens are permitted to grant amnesty to one prisoner over the Feast of the Passover. When the crowd begins to shout ‘Barabbas’, as we know it must, then you must shout it too. You must not appear to be different in any way from the rest of the citizens. This is vitally important. You have to appear to be in agreement with the rest of the crowd. You must jeer at Christ and shake your fists as he drags the cross through the streets. You must remember that communities in those times were not very large, and if a small section of people is silent the others will begin to wonder why and will question you. You will be sure to give yourselves away under stress — not because you are idiots but because you are clever. People in those times were simple. They followed the ring-leaders, and they will regard anyone who does not with great suspicion. It is far more difficult to think and speak with simplicity under pressure than it is the reverse, so do as I say and everyone will be perfectly safe. It may be distasteful and even repugnant to your nature, but it is a necessity. When they nail up the sign ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, you must laugh. Those that remain awestruck while the rest of the crowd are dancing and prancing, screaming and shouting, will only draw attention to themselves by their silence. I repeat, it is for your own safety.

Garry Kilworth, Let's Go to Golgotha!: The Songbirds of Pain

“And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece – just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.”

― Tim Powers, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories

“You can have everything in the world, but if you don't have love, none of it means crap," he said promptly. "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love."

And the greatest of these is love," I finished. "That's from the Bible."

First Corinthians, chapter thirteen," Thomas confirmed. "I paraphrased. Father makes all of us memorize that passage. Like when parents put those green yucky-face stickers on the poisonous cleaning products under the kitchen sink.”

― Jim Butcher, Blood Rites

230 Christianity

I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.” — Napoleon Bonaparte (French General, Politician and Emperor (1804-14). 1769-1821)

280 Christian denominations

Catholic:

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

― Pope John Paul II

Protestantism: 

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Orthodox:

Because faith is not logical certainty but a personal relationship, and because this personal relationship is as yet very incomplete in each of us and needs continually to develop further, it is by no means impossible for faith to coexist with doubt. The two are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps there are some who by God's grace retain throughout their life the faith of a little child, enabling them to accept without question all that they have been taught. For most of those living in the West today, however, such an attitude is simply not possible. We have to make our own the cry, “Lord, I believe: help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). For very many of us this will remain our constant prayer right up to the very gates of death. Yet doubt does not in itself signify lack of faith. It may mean the opposite—that our faith is alive and growing. For faith implies not complacency but taking risks, not shutting ourselves off from the unknown but advancing boldly to meet it. Here an Orthodox Christian may readily make his own the words of Bishop J.A.T. Robinson: “The act of faith is a constant dialogue with doubt.” As Thomas Merton rightly says, “Faith is a principle of questioning and struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and peace.”

Faith, then, signifies a personal relationship with God; a relationship as yet incomplete and faltering, yet none the less real. It is to know God not as a theory or an abstract principle, but as a person. To know a person is far more than to know facts about that person. To know a person is essentially to love him or her; there can be no true awareness of other persons without mutual love. We do not have any genuine knowledge of those whom we hate. Here, then, are the two least misleading ways of speaking about the God who surpasses our understanding: he is personal, and he is love. And these are basically two ways of saying the same thing. Our way of entry into the mystery of God is through personal love. As The Cloud of Unknowing says, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love can he be caught and held, but by thinking never.”

-Bishop of Diokleia  Kallistos, The Orthodox Way

290 Other religions

Atheism/Agnostic:

By way of introduction, my name is Hemant, and I’m a friendly atheist. I’m serious when I say that in this book, I’m going to do my best to help improve the way churches present the Christian message.

 As I read Christian books, and as I spent months attending an amazing variety of churches in different parts of the country, I kept running across a consistent and troubling truth about American Christianity. It is clear that most churches have aligned themselves against nonreligious people. By adopting this stance, Christians have turned off the people I would think they want to connect with. The combative stance I’ve observed in many churches, and from many Christians on an individual level, is an approach that causes people to become apathetic—and even antagonistic—toward religion as a whole. By displaying a negative attitude toward anyone outside the religious community, people of faith make enemies of those who don’t believe in the same God they do.

I am not angry with God, and I don’t want to rid the world of religion. In this book, as we talk about matters of belief and nonbelief, I hope you will think of me not simply as an atheist, but rather as a person with questions about faith, an openness to evidence that might contradict my current beliefs, and a curiosity about Christianity and its message. Please don’t assume I am the enemy of religious belief. I’m not trying to tear down anyone’s religion, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

 -Hemant Mehta, I Sold My Soul on eBay 

Buddhism:

“Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we've utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities—warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful—happier.”

― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

Cults:

“No one listening [to Jones' sermons], even those who were the most devoted to him, could take it all in. But at some point each follower heard something that reaffirmed his or her personal reason for belonging to Peoples Temple, and for believing in Jim Jones. As Jonestown historian Fielding McGehee observes, "What you thought Jim said depended on who you were.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Jim Jones was a dedicated Esquire reader, and for him its January 1962 issue (which reached newsstands in December 1961) could not have been timelier. One lead story, touted on the cover, was titled “9 Places in the World to Hide,” the cities and/or regions where inhabitants had the best odds of survival following nuclear war. Reporter Caroline Bird”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 “In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts. The purpose of Peoples Temple was to offer such a compelling example of living in racial and economic equality that everyone else would be won over and want to live the same way.”

― Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

Hinduism:

“If I were asked to define the Hindu creed, I should simply say: Search after truth through non-violent means. A man may not believe in God and still call himself a Hindu. Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after truth... Hinduism is the religion of truth. Truth is God. Denial of God we have known. Denial of truth we have not known.”

― Mahatma Gandhi 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”

― Mahatma Gandhi , Gandhi: An autobiography

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“And that is why all of us with one voice call one God differently as Paramatma, Ishwara, Shiva, Vishnu, Rama, Allah, Khuda, Dada Hormuzda, Jehova, God, and an infinite variety of names. He is one and yet many; He is smaller than an atom, and bigger than the Himalayas. He is contained even in a drop of the ocean, and yet not even the seven seas can compass Him. Reason is powerless to know Him. He is beyond the reach or grasp of reason.”

― Mahatma Gandhi, What is Hinduism?

Islam:

My adolescent life never marched in rhythm with those of my non-Muslim friends. Balancing Muslim practices successfully with teenage life in Los Angeles was no easy feat. Leaving my non-Muslim friends in order to perform my prayers several times a day was uncomfortable. Abstaining from food and water during the fasting month of Ramadan evoked frankly incredulous stares. Those of my Muslim acquaintances who wore a head scarf, a hijab, wore daily visible evidence of their differences. Islam is a religion of orthopraxy, practice-oriented rather than doctrine-oriented. The practice of Islam, therefore, cannot be kept totally secret, much to adolescent dismay. Islam is often called a way of life rather than a religion. The Qur’an hardly differentiates between practical life and spiritual life. Muhammad,** the Prophet of Islam, led his community practically as well as spiritually.

-Sumbul Ali-Karamali, The Muslim Next Door: The Qur'an, the Media, and That Veil Thing

Judaism:

 “One year, on Yom Kippur eve, Salanter did not show up in synagogue for services. The congregation was extremely worried; they could only imagine that their rabbi had suddenly taken sick or been in an accident. In any case, they would not start the service without him. During the wait, a young woman in the congregation became agitated. She had left her infant child at home asleep in its crib; she was certain she would only be away a short while. Now, because of the delay, she slipped out to make sure that the infant was all right. When she reached her house, she found her child being rocked in the arms of Rabbi Salanter. He had heard the baby crying while walking to the synagogue and, realizing that the mother must have gone off to services, had gone into the house to calm him.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Ameikh ami, ve’Elo-hai-ikh Elo-hai—

Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

― Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy

Mormonism:

I know an awful lot about Mormonism. It is generational in my family. My ancestors were our family’s original members of the church and made the arduous trek across the midwestern plains and Rocky Mountains, some of them pushing handcarts and others riding in covered wagons pulled by oxen.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mormons had a saying that everyone memorized early on. It went like this: “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” This was the concept of eternal progression. Therefore, God was once just like me and eventually graduated to Godhood, and I was on the same track. So, there was a lot on the line compelling me to behave. We had other incentives, of course, but this was the big one. It doesn’t get much bigger. I can now understand how all this God business must have rubbed people the wrong way. Of course, most people don’t think they are on the God track the way I did. They think it is the height of insanity, the epitome of arrogance, or the gall of blasphemy (or, more likely, all three of them at once). But I wasn’t the only person who figured he’d be a God someday. My dentist, doctor, school teacher, and garbage collector all thought the same thing. And so did my barber, scoutmaster, and Little League coach, to say nothing of the Governor, our two United States Senators, and our Congressmen. It was a mainstream belief in my town. (You’ll notice there are no women on the list. That is because only men could become Gods. A woman, provided she was married to a Mormon man, could become a Goddess, but she wouldn’t get her own planet—she’d just help her husband manage his.)

-Warren Driggs, Mormon Boy: A Memoir 

Paganism:

“Paganism is one of the first religions that deliberately incorporates new perspectives from science, metaphysics, and mysticism into its spirituality and consciously breaks from the traditional Newtonian view of the world. Pagans tend to see all parts of the universe-from the smallest atom to the largest planetary system-as sacred and having some form of consciousness or spark of intelligence. Most Pagans believe that this living universe is able to communicate to all parts of itself on one or more levels, and that these parts can choose to cooperate together for specific ends. Pagans call this cooperation magick.

― Joyce Higginbotham, Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions

Scientology:

“The real and, to me, inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 per cent efficient mechanical man—superbly free-floating, unemotional, and unrelated to anything. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of the inner manipulative clique.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Scientology, a fundamentally narcissistic philosophy that demonizes doubt and insecurity as products of the "reactive mind," is a belief system tailor-made for actors. The Training Routines that are part of early Scientology indoctrination have been compared to acting exercises: students are taught to "duplicate," or mirror, a partner's actions; project their "intention," or thoughts, onto inanimate objects; experiment with vocal tones, the most dominant being a commanding bark known as "tone 40"; and deepen their ability to "be in their bodies" without reacting to outside stimuli. In auditing, Scientologists re-create scenes from past lives. Some processes focus directly on members "mocking up," or visualizing themselves, in different scenarios.”

― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

Shinto:

Shinto, the indigenous faith of the Japanese people, has long been a source of fascination for both the casual visitor and old-timer. The strange symbolism, exotic rites, ceremonies, and festivals, and the mystic atmosphere of the shrines constitute a never-ending lure for those who would pry into the recesses of the religious faith of this people. However, except for the student who has the interest, ability, and almost inexhaustible resources in time for his investigation, Shinto remains practically a closed book.

-Sokyo Ono, Shinto the Kami Way 

Taoism

“The honey doesn't taste so good once it is being eaten; the goal doesn't mean so much once it is reached; the reward is no so rewarding once it has been given. If we add up all the rewards in our lives, we won't have very much. But if we add up the spaces *between* the rewards, we'll come up with quite a bit. And if we add up the rewards *and* the spaces, then we'll have everything - every minute of the time that we spent.”

― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

Theism:

“ I'm always talking to God about whether or not he exists - that's how I know I'm a theist. ”

“Even the devils are theists. I am of all people one of the least qualified to judge, but I do believe that some atheists are closer to God than are some theists. With Him, it is better to be distant in the mind but near in the heart than it is to be distant in the heart but near in the mind.”

― Criss Jami, Healology

The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.”

― Criss Jami, Killosophy

Wiccan:

“The Wiccan Rede You can do whatever you want so long as you do not harm anyone. This is a belief that true practitioners take to heart and is one of the underlying, non-negotiable beliefs common to all schools of Wicca.  The Rule of Three This is quite a simple principle - whatever you do to others will come back to you three times over. Thus, if you choose to send out negative energy into the world, or choose to do wicked things, you are only hurting yourself. We are all Connected Wiccans believe that everyone and everything is spiritually connected and so it is important to work to improve the world, for the good of all.”

― Sasha Cillihypi, Wicca: 101 Reference (The Definitive Guide on The Practice of Wicca, Spells, Rituals and Witchcraft)

o            

301  Sociology:

“Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”

― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

303 Leadership:

“I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”

― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

“The problem with your company is not the economy, it is not the lack of opportunity, it is not your team. The problem is you. That is the bad news. The good news is, if you're the problem, you're also the solution. You're the one person you can change the easiest. You can decide to grow. Grow your abilities, your character, your education, and your capacity. You can decide who you want to be and get about the business of becoming that person.”

― Dave Ramsey, EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches

306 Marriage and Family:

First comes Love:

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

― Dr. Seuss

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”

― Robert Fulghum, True Love

Then Comes Marriage:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Married life can seem as if it's only five days long. The first day you meet, the second day you marry, the third day your raise your children, the fourth day you meet your grandchildren, and the fifth day you die first or bury your spouse to go home alone for the first time in many years.”

― Mark Driscoll, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together

“Friendship fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.”

― John M. Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert

LOVE is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands. The will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure associated with love, or what is today called “sex,” is the frosting on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it.

There are two extremes to be avoided in discussing married love: one is the refusal to recognize sexual love, the other is the giving of primacy to sexual attraction. The first error was Victorian; the second is Freudian. To the Christian, sex is inseparable from the person, and to reduce the person to sex is as silly as to reduce personality to lungs or a thorax.

― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

Holy Sex-lovemaking that occurs in the free union of a married man and woman-allows a couple to safely overcome the overactive sense of shame that cause people to hold back when they ought to give themselves more freely to each other and to God. When a husband and wife in a truly committed, loving, generous, and respectful relationship make love with one another, they are given the grace, over time, to overcome their temptation to use one another or fear being used by one another.

Infallible Lovers never restrain their passion for one another, but they are always mindful that love is the point of lovemaking, not creating some sexual drama.

-Gregory K. Popcak, PH.D., Holy Sex: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving

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Parenting:

“The job of parents is to model. Modeling includes how to be a man or woman; how to relate intimately to another person; how to acknowledge and express emotions; how to fight fairly; how to have physical, emotional and intellectual boundaries; how to communicate; how to cope and survive life’s unending problems; how to be self-disciplined; and how to love oneself and another. Shame-based parents cannot do any of these. They simply don’t know how.”

― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

Who is fostering the myth that there is a correct way to handle every situation? Nearly everybody-the media, the experts, and most of all parents themselves.

Most problems can be handled any number of ways, and often the more creative ways work best, even though you wouldn’t find them in a book of “how to’s.” You and your child are unique, and books can only offer general suggestions. How cleverly you use those suggestions, or come up with your own, is up to you.

The reality is that your methods can be effective or ineffective, helpful or useless. Instead of judging your actions as right or wrong, apply the key question: Is this working or isn’t it? This is a much more meaningful test of your methods and it will make you less likely to downgrade yourself as a parent.

-Raymond N. Guarendi Ph.D., You’re a Better Parent Than You Think! A Common-Sense Parenting

For many the call to adopt comes when the phone rings, and they hear of a baby or child ready for them. The internal call has been ringing steadily, as they’ve been childless and long ready to be child-more. In other words, for those wanting to adopt to start a family, the call is pretty clear. It’s what they want, and it’s been what they’ve wanted. 

Granted, ten kids isn’t for everybody. There are simpler ways to get tax deductions. Nevertheless, as we asserted our lives though the years, obviously with no guarantees on the future, we really had no reason to keep us from seeking to adopt another child. Fortunately for us, we kept having no reasons for the next few kids.

Whether you’re thinking of expanding form none to one, one to two, two to three or nine to ten, do a little personal home study. Is your marriage solid? Is your home life a source of contentment? Are your finances manageable? Is your house able to accommodate another? Are your work schedules amenable? Are you emotionally healthy? Do you need another player for the soccer team?

-Raymond N. Guarendi Ph.D., Adoption: choosing it, living it, loving it.

310 Statistics

All experiments are sloppy and that very seldom does even the most careful scientist get the number right. Little unforeseen and unobservable glitches occur in every experiment. The air in the room might be too warm and the sliding weight might stick for a microsecond before it begins to slide. A slight breeze from a passing butterfly might have an effect. What one really gets out of an experiment is a scatter of numbers, not one of which is right but all of which can be used to get a close estimate of the correct value. Armed with Pearson’s revolutionary idea, we do not look upon experimental results as carefully measured numbers in their own right. Instead, they are examples of a scatter of numbers, a distribution of numbers, to use the more accepted term. This distribution of numbers can be written as a mathematical formula that tells us the probability that an observed number will be a given value. What value that number actually takes in a specific experiment is unpredictable. We can only talk about probabilities of values and not about certainties of values. The results of individual experiments are random, in the sense that they are unpredictable. The statistical models of distributions, however, enable us to describe the mathematical nature of that randomness.

-David Salsburg,  The Lady Tasting Tea

320 Politics: 

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future. ”

― John F. Kennedy

“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”

― Ronald Reagan

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”

― P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

330 Economy:

“...Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.”

― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

According to a 2009 US Department of Labor report, the average American family of three spends about $ 6,133 per year on groceries. That’s $ 511 each month and breaks down to $ 170 per person! If you’re like the average family and we could help you reduce your food bill just 20 percent, at the end of the year you’d have over $ 1,200 in the bank. Wow, that’s not just pocket change— that’s some real savings. And if you learn to use a few more strategies, you’ll easily save 50 percent or more.

-Steve & Annette Economides, Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half with America's Cheapest Family 

“Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.”

― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

331 Labor

As with the other books, there are deliberate omissions in this one: notably, clergymen (though a young priest is here), doctors (there is a dentist), politicians, journalists and writers of any kind (the exception is a film critic; her subject, work as reflected or non-reflected in movies). I felt that their articulateness and expertise offered them other forums. My transcribing their attitudes would be nothing more than self-indulgence. I was interested in other counties not often heard from. Choices were in many instances arbitrary. People are engaged in thousands of jobs. Whom to visit? Whom to pass by? In talking to the washroom attendant, would I be remiss in neglecting the elevator operator? One felt his job “obsolete.” Wouldn’t the other, too? In visiting the Chicago bookbinder, I missed the old Massachusetts basket weaver. I had been told about the New Englander, who found delight in his work. So did my Chicago acquaintance. Need I have investigated the lot of an assembler at the electronics plant, having spent time with spot-welders at Ford? An assembly line is a line is a line. An unusually long sequence of this book is devoted to the automobile—its making, its driving, its parking, its selling. Also its servicing. There is its residue, too: traffic, noise, accident, crime, pollution, TV commercials, and human orneriness at its worst.

-Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

338 Food:

I think, occasionally, about the worst candy bar I ever ate, purchased on an overnight bus trip from Istanbul to Izmir back in 1986 and which had a picture of a donkey on the wrapper (this should have been a red flag) and a thick strip of cardboard to make it seem bulkier and which tasted like rancid carob and had a consistency similar to the sandy stuff Dr. Gulevich used to blast between my teeth. More often, though, I think about the candy bars of my youth that no longer exist, the Skrunch Bar, the Starbar, Summit, Milk Shake, Powerhouse, and more recent bars which have been wrongly pulled from the shelves—Hershey’s sublime Cookies ’n Mint leaps to mind—and I say kaddish for all of them. And when I say I think about these bars I am not referring to some momentary pulsing of the nostalgia buds. I am talking about detailed considerations of how they looked and tasted, the whipped splendor of the Choco-Lite, whose tiny air pockets provided such a piquant crunch (the oral analogue to stomping on bubble wrap), the unprecedented marriage of peanuts and wafers in the Bar None, the surprising bulk of the Reggie!, little more than a giant peanut turtle, but round—a bar that dared to be round! Or, at the other extreme, the Marathon Bar, which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn’t resist the gimmick.

-Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America 

 “The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.”

 “Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”

― Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

If you’re interested in ice cream, you eat any and all ice cream you can get your hands on (preferably while watching old sci-fi and monster movies). You read ice cream cookbooks, cookie cookbooks, cake cookbooks. You walk up and down the aisles of the grocery store, studying ingredients. You borrow peanut butter from this flavor, honey-bacon cornbread from that one. You experiment. You play around with it until it belongs to you, and hopefully tastes somewhat fresh and new. When you create a new flavor of ice cream, when you start a new screenplay, or do anything in the arts, you draw on your life experience … all the way back to childhood. Often, when I’m making new flavors, I’m aware of an innate desire to transport myself through cooking, through ice cream back in time … to make that connection to the kid I used to be. So I can experience a little of the wonder, the awe of first times again.

Brian Smith, Ample Hills Creamery: Secrets and Stories from Brooklyn's Favorite Ice Cream Shop

“The birth of the fast food industry coincided with Eisenhower-era glorifications of technology, with optimistic slogans like “Better Living through Chemistry” and “Our Friend the Atom.” The sort of technological wizardry that Walt Disney promoted on television and at Disneyland eventually reached its fulfillment in the kitchens of fast food restaurants. Indeed, the corporate culture of McDonald’s seems inextricably linked to that of the Disney empire, sharing a reverence for sleek machinery, electronics, and automation. The leading fast food chains still embrace a boundless faith in science—and as a result have changed not just what Americans eat, but also how their food is made.”

― Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Mealalt

340 Law:

“There are doubtless those who would wish to lock up all those who suspected of terrorist and other serious offences and, in the time-honored phrase, throw away the key. But a suspect is by definition a person whom no offence has been proved. Suspicions, even if reasonably entertained, may prove to be misplaced, as a series of tragic miscarriages of justice has demonstrated. Police officers and security officials can be wrong. It is a gross injustice to deprive of his liberty for significant periods a person who has committed no crime and does not intend to do so. No civilized country should willingly tolerate such injustices.”

― Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law

“The fundamental tension of the profession is the struggle between bold advocacy of the client's interests and the need to establish and hold to limits that prevent advocacy from leading to irrational and inequitable results; and thus the lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system, and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions which that system places on them both. ”

― Scott Turow, One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School

The architect Cass Gilbert had grand ambitions for his design of a new home for the Supreme Court—what he called “the greatest tribunal in the world, one of the three great elements of our national government.” Gilbert knew that the approach to the Court, as much as the structure itself, would define the experience of the building, but the site presented a challenge. Other exalted Washington edifices—the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial—inspired awe with their processional approaches. But in 1928 Congress had designated for the Court a cramped and asymmetrical plot of land, wedged tightly between the Capitol and the Library of Congress. How could Gilbert convey to visitors the magnitude and importance of the judicial process taking place within the Court’s walls? The answer, he decided, was steps. Gilbert pushed back the wings of the building, so that the public face of the building would be a portico with a massive and imposing stairway. Visitors would not have to walk a long distance to enter, but few would forget the experience of mounting those forty-four steps to the double row of eight massive columns supporting the roof. The walk up the stairs would be the central symbolic experience of the Supreme Court, a physical manifestation of the American march to justice. The stairs separated the Court from the everyday world—and especially from the earthly concerns of the politicians in the Capitol—and announced that the justices would operate, literally, on a higher plane. That, in any event, was the theory. The truth about the Court has always been more complicated.

-Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine 

355 Military science

“If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected .”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

364 True Crime

“Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.”

― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

"I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane."

— Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

370 Education:

And yet, while teens and young adults have absorbed digital tools into their daily lives like no other age group, while they have grown up with more knowledge and information readily at hand, taken more classes, built their own Web sites, enjoyed more libraries, bookstores, and museums in their towns and cities . . . in sum, while the world has provided them extraordinary chances to gain knowledge and improve their reading/writing skills, not to mention offering financial incentives to do so, young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture. They don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs. In fact, their technology skills fall well short of the common claim, too, especially when they must apply them to research and workplace tasks.

― Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

I think a trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. I think the stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning.

We are lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That's nuts.

-Mike Rowe

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

― Tara Westover, Educated

381 Commerce (Trade)

“Our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that their geographic, climatic, and intellectual endowments best enable them to do, and to exchange those goods for what is best produced elsewhere, trade has directly propelled our global prosperity.”

― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

383 Postal communication

“In February 1914, the Pierstorffs of Grangeville, Idaho, sent their five-year-old daughter to visit her grandmother 75 miles away in Lewiston via parcel post, because it was cheaper than buying her a train ticket. Little May Pierstorff weighed 48 pounds, which meant that she was just under the Post Office Department’s 50-pound limit for parcels. The Grangeville postmaster charged her parents 53 cents, attaching the appropriate stamps to the front of her coat. May traveled all the way to Lewiston in a railway baggage car under the watchful eye of a railway mail clerk. When she arrived, a mail clerk on duty drove her to her grandmother’s house rather than leaving her at the post office for morning delivery. Soon there were more incidents of “child mailing,” and finally the Post Office Department outlawed the practice.”

― Devin Leonard, Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service

385 Railroad transportation

“Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.

[On British railway dining cars]”

― Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People

387 Water, air, Transportaion

We live in an age when travel by sea is for pleasure, so that we look forward happily to the prospect of sunlit days on a liner gliding through calm, sparkling seas while a bell melodiously calls us for yet another meal. But the abiding image of a shipside departure in the decades leading up to the First World War is of a weeping young wife, with a child clinging to her skirt, being separated from her husband who is emigrating in the hope of finding a better life for them all. The deep apprehension of those who had bravely taken the decision to emigrate was further clouded by the uncertainty of the journey, which encompassed both the unknown shipmates with whom the emigrant would be berthed and the capriciousness of the sea itself.

-Christopher Deakes, A Century of Sea Travel: Personal Accounts from the Steamship Era 

“The heavens had become an immense, quivering, horizon-wide curtain of fluorescence, like God’s laundry flapping in the night sky.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Air travel is a complicated, inconvenient, and often scary affair for millions of people, and at the same time it’s cloaked in secrecy. Its mysteries are concealed behind a wall of specialized jargon, corporate reticence, and an irresponsible media.”

― Patrick Smith, Cockpit Confidential

388 Transportation

despite the indignity of commuting by bicycle, I not only continue to do it, but also find it both practical and enjoyable. This is true of more and more people all over the country, and consequently many cities and towns are reworking their streets to accommodate them. In the meantime, though, the streets remain a place rife with indignity, as well as absurdity, conflict, misunderstanding, misfortune, and even death—for, as long as there are people, they will make poor decisions, and as long as there are vehicles, they will crash into each other. We live in a country beset by many problems: a troubled economy; a lack of affordable health care; involvement in two wars; the constant specter of terrorism; and an overall decrease in the quality of our popular entertainment that is, quite frankly, staggering. Yet somehow, when the public discourse turns to something as seemingly innocuous as riding bicycles for transportation, people respond vociferously enough to make Mel Gibson blush. Radio DJs advocate running down cyclists; Critical Massers cry for “U-lock justice”; some say the United States should follow the leads of bike-friendly countries such as Holland and Denmark; others say bicycles should be banned altogether. And everyone, regardless of vehicle choice, recounts his or her own personal indignities and cites examples of why all other modes of transit are evil. Yes, everybody’s angry when it comes to commuting, and in a society in which racism is no longer acceptable, prejudice based on transport has rushed in to fill the void. But is there hope for the future? Are cyclists really saving the world? Are drivers really destroying it? Is one vehicle truly better than the other? And can’t we all put aside our petty differences, join hands, and hate one thing together and in perfect harmony? If you want the short version, the answers to the above questions are: Yes, No, No, That depends, and Mel Gibson. I believe that if we can figure out a way to emerge from the other end of our commute in a state of happiness, we can change the world.

-BikeSnobNYC, The Enlightened Cyclist: Commuter Angst, Dangerous Drivers, and Other Obstacles on the Path to Two-Wheeled Transcendence

IN THE SECOND HALF OF the nineteenth century, the horse-pulled streetcar, clip-clopping along at five miles per hour and filled with an unbearable stench, slowly began to cripple two great American cities. In Boston and New York, there were too many people and no safe, fast, reliable way for them to move from one neighborhood to the next. In the summer heat, carriages inched forward until the animals reared up their legs in frustration, and police had to come out swinging their clubs to restore peace. During the winter it was no better. Horses struggled to get their footing in the snow and ice and were driven to exhaustion or sometimes death. When a solution to the problem finally emerged—a subway—subway—it was rejected time and again, either by corrupt politicians, selfish businessmen, or terrified citizens. “A menace to the health of the public,” a man of the times said. A newspaper article went even further, describing a subway ride like “living in a tomb.” This is a story about fabulously wealthy Gilded Age industrialists and dirt-poor immigrants during a period when Fifth Avenue mansions and Beacon Hill brownstones stood blocks from sheet-covered shanties and rat-infested tenements. But it’s also about an age of innovation, an exhilarating time after the Civil War when the telephone, lightbulb, typewriter, cash register, dishwasher, sewing machine, electric motor, and even dynamite were born of a need to make life simpler.

-Doug Most, The Race Underground 

389 Metrology 

The ability to know the weather in many places at one time was the first step toward knowing the weather in one place at many times, most usefully times in the future. Once the telegraph caught on, meteorologists found their work newly practical, and the field was transformed “from weather science to weather service,” as the historian James Rodger Fleming has put it. In 1848, the Smithsonian launched a meteorological observation program that aimed to take advantage of the new telegraph networks to provide advance notice of bad weather. When its new headquarters building opened on the Mall in Washington in 1855, the lobby featured a giant map of the United States. Volunteer and paid “Smithsonian Observers,” as they were known, would send weather reports in from all over the country, and a paper disk the size of a poker chip was pinned to the location of each report on the lobby map, with conditions indicated by different colors: white for fair weather, black for rain, brown for clouds and blue for snow. “This map is not only of interest to visitors in exhibiting the kind of weather which their friends at a distance are experiencing but is also of importance in determining at a glance the probable changes which may soon be expected,” the Smithsonian’s directors reported in 1858.

-Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine 

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394 Hugs and Kisses:

But beyond the shiverin’, twitterin,’ toe-twitchin,’ sexy-feel-good of it, what do we really know about kissing? Is it truly the doorway to the soul that poets wax on about? The barometer for connubial bliss?  The yin to the yang? The moth to the flame?

For me, understanding the meaning of this intoxicating interaction has been my manifest destiny. I’ve long felt its gravitational pull. It’s mesmerized me, preoccupied me and shaped my perception of things.

-Andréa Demirjian , Kissing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About One of Life's Sweetest Pleasures (2006)

If we had to be blunt and direct we could agree with Dr. Henry Gibbons that a kiss is simply “the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction.” But who wants to be blunt and direct? The real point is, What does kissing mean? What does it do to you? How does it make you feel? To answer those questions you have to ask people who are in love or who are infatuated because they—and not dictionaries—are the true experts when it comes to defining what kissing is.

-William Cane, The Art of Kissing

The book contains plenty of practical advice on how to make yourself more huggable based on actual responses. It also examines more than twenty different types of hugs—from basic heart-to-heart and side-by-side hugs to more unusual moving hugs and group hugs and specialized forms of hugging such as holding hands—explaining how to do every hug and highlighting what men and women like and dislike about each one. The final section on hugging technique is the result of tabulating and analyzing comments from people all over the world.

-William Cane, The Art of Hugging 

The phenomenon of kissing plays a very important role throughout one’s life. For a child, kissing symbolizes love and approval. It is a reward for being good and is a warm send-off to a good night’s sleep. Mom’s kisses have magical powers to make the hurt go away. Kissing can even break spells to awaken Sleeping Beauties and turn frogs into princes. So, from the start, kissing is a very pleasurable concept.

Think about kissing for a minute. It’s really a rather bizarre act. You pucker the lips that frame your mouth-a damp, ger-infested opening through which food(and who knows what else) passes- and touch another with them. Sort of sounds the same way that eating fried chicken embryos for breakfast does, doesn’t it? So where did this kissing idea originate? Why isn’t it a rubbing of bellies or a foundling of fingers? And how was it cajoled into participating?

-Tomima Edmark, The kissing book

This is a book about hugging. Hugging is an instinct, a natural response to feelings of affection, compassion, need, and joy. Hugging is also a science, a simple method of support, healing, and growth, with measurable and remarkable results. In its highest form, hugging is also an art. Techniques of hugging are described here with a cheerful mix of whimsy and seriousness. May they serve as a framework for you to create your own experience and practice as a Hug Therapist.

-Kathleen Keating, The Hug Therapy Book 

 Yet the behavior we recognize as kissing simply cries out for better scientific explanation. Just think: From a completely clinical perspective, microbiologists will tell you that it is a means for two people to swap mucus, bacteria, and who knows what else. Picturing all those tiny organisms swishing through our saliva isn’t just unromantic, it inspires a question: Why would this mode of transferring germs evolve? And why is it so enjoyable when the chemistry is right?

-Sheril Kirshenbaum, The Science of Kissing

395 Etiquette (Manners)

Although today’s manners are more situational, tailored to particular circumstances and the expectations of those around us, they remain a combination of common sense, generosity of spirit, and a few specific “rules” that help us interact thoughtfully. And as fluid as manners are (and always have been), they rest on the same bedrock principles: respect, consideration, and honesty. Respect. Respecting other people means recognizing their value as human beings, regardless of their background, race, or creed. A respectful person would also never treat a salesperson, a waiter, or an office assistant as somehow inferior.

Respect is demonstrated in all your day-to-day relations—refraining from demeaning others for their ideas and opinions, refusing to laugh at racist or sexist jokes, putting prejudices aside, and staying open-minded. Self-respect is just as important as respect for others. A self-confident person isn’t boastful or pushy but is secure with herself in a way that inspires confidence in others. She values herself regardless of her physical attributes or individual talents, understanding that honor and character are what really matter. Consideration. Thoughtfulness and kindness are folded into consideration for other people. Consideration also encapsulates the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Being thoughtful means thinking about what you can do to put people at ease, while kindness is more about acts. Taken together, these qualities lead us to help a friend or stranger in need, to bestow a token of appreciation, to offer praise. Honesty. Honesty has more to do with ethics than etiquette, but the two are intertwined. What could be more unmannerly than being deceptive? Honesty ensures that we act sincerely and is also the basis of tact: speaking and acting in ways that won’t cause unnecessary offense. A tactful person can say something honest about another person without causing great embarrassment or pain. In other words, tact calls for both empathy empathy and benevolent honesty: “I like the other bathing suit on you better” is honest, while “That bathing suit makes you look fat” may be equally true but amounts to an insult. Two Other Essential Qualities GRACIOUSNESS AND DEFERENCE are also part and parcel of mannerly behavior. Graciousness is the ability to handle situations with aplomb and flexibility, while showing deference can be as easy as removing one’s hat in a place of worship. The mark of a gracious person is his ability to put people at ease and spare them any embarrassment. (You’re being gracious when someone forgets your name during an introduction and you say, “Oh, please don’t feel bad! I’m always drawing a blank when I try to remember names.”) It’s easy to forget that “gracious” is the adjective form of “grace,” which dictionaries variously define as “good will; favor”; “thoughtfulness toward others”; and “a sense of what is right and proper.” By any definition, grace is a quality anyone should strive to achieve. Deference is primarily a means of recognizing a person’s experience and accomplishments. Courtesies like standing when an older person enters a room, giving a senior executive the head seat at a conference table, and addressing authority figures by their titles and last names (unless they specifically request otherwise) do not demean anyone. Far from it. Deferring politely reflects well on the person who defers by demonstrating that he values other people for their achievements. Four Things Etiquette Is Not Misconceptions about etiquette and the need for it abound, which makes it necessary to list four things that etiquette is most certainly not: A set of rigid rules. Manners change with the times (something Emily Post emphasized from the beginning) and today are more flexible than ever before. Etiquette isn’t a set of “prescriptions for properness” but merely a set of guidelines for doing things in ways that make people feel comfortable. Something for the wealthy or well-born. Etiquette is a code of behavior for people from all walks of life, every socioeconomic group, and of all ages. No one is immune to having his life enhanced by good manners. A thing of the past. Sometimes it seems that yesterday’s standards have gone out the window, but today’s more casual approach to things is something that sits on the surface. The bedrock principles of etiquette remain as solid as they ever were. Snobbishness. Little violates the tenets of etiquette more than snobbery—which, more often than not, is just another name for pretentiousness. A person who looks down on others shows himself not as superior but small—the kind who’s anything but respectful and considerate. Actions Express Attitude PEOPLE WHO REALLY PAY ATTENTION to others have little trouble translating what they see and hear into courteous behavior. Courteous people are empathetic—able to relate emotionally to the feelings of others. They listen closely to what people say. They observe what is going on around them and register what they see. A self-centered person might say, “I know exactly how you feel” to someone in a traumatic situation and then immediately start describing his own experiences. An empathetic person is more likely to say something like, “I can’t know how you feel right now, but I can understand your grief [or anger or sadness]. And if you want to talk about it, I’m here to listen.” This concern for others leads to another characteristic of courteous people: They are flexible—willing to adjust their own behavior to the needs and feelings of others. This doesn’t mean that well-mannered people are pushovers or lack strongly held principles. But courtesy means understanding that nobody is perfect. Courteous people aren’t so concerned about forms (using the right fork or introducing people in the correct order) that they would embarrass or denigrate others for simple breaches of etiquette. Courteous people would never use another person’s mistakes as an excuse to react with callous words or cruel acts. Why Etiquette Matters GROUNDED AS IT IS in timeless principles, etiquette enables us to face whatever the future may bring with strength of character and integrity. This ever-adaptive code of behavior also allows us to be flexible enough to respect those whose beliefs and traditions differ from our own. Civility and courtesy (in essence, the outward expressions of human decency) are the proverbial glue that holds society together—qualities that are more important than ever in today’s complex and changing world.

-Peggy Post, Emily Post's Etiquette 17th Edition

If each of us lived in a protective glass bubble, never encroached on anyone else’s living space, and never interacted with another soul, there would be no need for manners. We could simply do as we pleased, go about our business, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone else. But since Homo sapiens is gregarious and likes to establish and live in communities, and even in more intimate settings such as houses or apartments, rules of conduct are imperative. The starting point for all rules is the need to treat others with as much kindness and courtesy as you would like them to treat you with. That means keeping your more self-centered instincts in check. The best way to do this, especially in a family with school-age children, is to establish some guidelines for living together.

-Nancy Tuckerman, The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette 

A lady’s telephone conversations, whether business or private, are still personal. She knows that others in her immediate vicinity do not want to hear her close a deal or recount the details of a television show. A lady knows that other people are no more interested in hearing her private conversations than she is in hearing theirs.

-Candace Simpson-Giles, How to Be a Lady Revised and   Expanded (The GentleManners Series)

 A gentleman understands that, for good or ill, as he walks down a sidewalk while engaged in a conversation via his wireless headset, passersby may understandably take him for a paranoid schizophrenic.

-John Bridges, How to Be a Gentleman

398 Folklore

I've been reading books of old

The legends and the myths

-Coldplay and Chainsmokers

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

-J. R. R. Tolkien

Fables: 

“Fables in sooth are not what they appear;

⁠Our moralists are mice, and such small deer.

⁠We yawn at sermons, but we gladly turn

⁠To moral tales, and so amused we learn.”

- Dr Johnson ,1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 10

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

-Jim Crace

AN ASTRONOMER used to go out at night to observe the stars. One evening, as he wandered through the suburbs with his whole attention fixed on the sky, he fell accidentally into a deep well. While he lamented and bewailed his sores and bruises, and cried loudly for help, a neighbor ran to the well, and learning what had happened said: "Hark ye, old fellow, why, in striving to pry into what is in heaven, do you not manage to see what is on earth?"

— Aesop (Aesop's Fables)

Folktales/Tall Tales:

The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.

-Joseph Campbell

“For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.”

― Angela Carter

Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.

-Marisa Silver

TALL TALK, OR EXAGGERATED storytelling, began in the 1800s as a way for Americans to come to terms with the vast and inhospitable lands they’d come to inhabit—thick, dark forests filled with bears and panthers; treeless, arid deserts and plains; towering mountains; and uncharted seacoasts. The heroes and heroines of the tales were like the land itself—gigantic, extravagant, restless, and flamboyant. Their exaggerated feats of courage and endurance helped the backwoodsman face the overwhelming task of developing such a land.

-Mary Pope Osborne, American Tall Tales

For many years there have come drifting out of the timber country strange tales of a giant logger and inventor, Paul Bunyan by name. He is said to have been the inventor of logging.  When he was a man grown, somewhere he found Babe, the Mighty Blue Ox, who was his constant companion.

-Glen Rounds, Ol' Paul, the Mighty Logger 

Before Brian knew he had the bow and the fiddle in his hand and he played away and they danced away, and they all said that they had never heard any fiddler playing a tune on a fiddle better than Brian Ó Braonacháin from Barr an Ghaoith. The big man who was in the company stood up and said that the dancing must stop now. “A couple of us must go for the priest, so that we can say Mass,” said he, “for this corpse must go out of here before daybreak.” “Oh,” said the girl with the curly dark hair, “there is no need to go for any priest tonight, the best priest in Ireland is sitting here beside me on the chair, Brian Ó Braonachain from Barr an Ghaoith.” “Oh, I have nothing of a priest’s power or holiness,” said Brian, “and I do not know anything about a priest’s work in any way.” “Come, come,” said she, “you will do that just as well as you did the rest.” Before Brian knew he was standing at the altar with two clerks and with the vestments on him.

-Jane Yolen, Favorite Folktales from Around the World 

Legends: “History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”

― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

Then Merlin said, "Sir Ector, I know very well who is this youth, for I have kept diligent watch over him for all this time. And I know that in him lieth the hope of Britain. Moreover, I tell thee that even today within the surface of an enchanted looking-glass I have beheld all that he hath done since the morning; and I know how he drew forth the sword from the anvil, and how he thrust it back again; and I know how he drew it forth and thrust it back a second time. And I know all that thou hast been saying unto him this while; wherefore I also do now avouch that thou hast told him the very truth. And, lo! the spirit of prophecy is upon me and I do foresee into the future that thou, Arthur, shall become the greatest and most famous King that ever lived in Britain; and I do foresee that many knights of extraordinary excellence shall gather about thee and that men shall tell of their marvelous deeds as long as this land shall continue, and I do foresee that through these knights thy reign shall be full of splendor and glory; and I do foresee that the most marvelous adventure of the Holy Grail shall be achieved by three of the knights of thy Court, and that to thy lasting renown, who shall be the King under whose reign the holy cup shall be achieved. All these things I foresee; and, lo! the time is now at hand when the glory of thy House shall again be made manifest unto the world, and all the people of this land shall rejoice in thee and thy kinghood. Wherefore, Sir Ector, for these three days to come, I do charge it upon thee that thou do guard this young man as the apple of thine eye, for in him doth lie the hope and salvation of all this realm."

― Howard Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights

In merry England in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades. Right merrily they dwelled within the depths of Sherwood Forest, suffering neither care nor want, but passing the time in merry games of archery or bouts of cudgel play, living upon the King's venison, washed down with draughts of ale of October brewing.

Not only Robin himself but all the band were outlaws and dwelled apart from other men, yet they were beloved by the country people round about, for no one ever came to jolly Robin for help in time of need and went away again with an empty fist.

And now I will tell how it came about that Robin Hood fell afoul of the law.

― Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Myth: “Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.”

― Joseph Campbell

“The early Greek mythologists transformed a world full of fear into a world full of beauty.”

― Edith Hamilton, Mythology

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

“THAT Perseus always won. That's why my mom had named me after him, even if he was son of Zeus and I was son of Poseidon. The original Perseus was one of the only heroes in the Greek myths who got a happy ending. The others died-betrayed, mauled, mutilated, poisoned, or cursed by the gods. My mom hoped I would inherit Perseus's luck. Judging by how my life was going so far, I wasn't too optimistic.”

― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters

“Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves.”

― Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus

Parables: A parable is a form of writing that tells a story about common everyday things within the range of every individual's experience, and at the same time draws a subtle analogy between the ordinary facts of the story and the deeper meaning which lies parallel to the facts. Literally, the word parable means, "a comparison.

-Ervin Seale (1966) Learn to Live. p. 16

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.

-Dudley Nichols, Film and/as literature, p. 238

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”   He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?”   And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”   Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.   Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.   So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.   But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion,   and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.   And the next day he took out two denarii[a] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’   Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”   He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

-Luke 10:25-37 Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)

399 Customs of war & diplomacy

“One of Ronald Reagan’s fantasies as president was that he would take Mikhail Gorbachev on a tour of the United States so the Soviet leader could see how ordinary Americans lived. Reagan often talked about it. He imagined that he and Gorbachev would fly by helicopter over a working-class community, viewing a factory and its parking lot filled with cars and then circling over the pleasant neighborhood where the factory workers lived in homes “with lawns and backyards, perhaps with a second car or a boat in the driveway, not the concrete rabbit warrens I’d seen in Moscow.” The helicopter would descend, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to knock on doors and ask the residents “what they think of our system.” The workers would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America.”

― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

400 Language

Though English was the language of my parents, the language in which I was raised and schooled, I have never felt I belonged to it. I learned my mother tongue self-consciously, quite often confusedly, as if my mother were a foreigner to me, and her sole language my second. Always, in some corner of my child mind, a running translation was struggling to keep up. To say this word or that word in other words. To recompose the words of a sentence like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Years before doctors informed me of my high-functioning autism and the disconnect it causes between man and language, I had to figure out the world as best I could. I was a misfit. The world was made up of words. But I thought and felt and sometimes dreamed in a private language of numbers. In my mind each number had a shape—complete with color and texture and occasionally motion (a neurological phenomenon that scientists call synesthesia)—and each shape a meaning. The meaning could be pictographic: eighty-nine, for instance, was dark blue, the color of a sky threatening storm; a beaded texture; and a fluttering, whirling, downward motion I understood as “snow” or, more broadly, “winter.” I remember, one winter, seeing snow fall outside my bedroom window for the first time. I was seven. The snow, pure white and thick-flaked, piled many inches high upon the ground, transforming the gray concrete of the neighborhood into a virgin, opalescent tundra. “Snow,” I gasped to my parents. “Eighty-nine,” I thought. The thought had hardly crossed my mind when I had another: nine hundred and seventy-nine. The view from my window resembled nine hundred and seventy-nine—the shimmer and beauty of eleven expanding, literally multiplying eighty-nine’s wintry swirl. I felt moved. My parents’ firstborn, I had been delivered at the end of a particularly cold and snowy January in 1979. The coincidence did not escape me. Everywhere I looked, it seemed, there were private meanings writ large.

-Daniel Tammet, Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing 

410 Linguistics

418 Standard usage (Prescriptive linguistics)

Anuvad, the Hindi word for translate, means “to tell again,” as Christi A. Merrill notes. When you tell a story, you become part of that story, and the translator too becomes part of the stories he or she tells. Yet translation inevitably involves guises and masks that can make this truth difficult to perceive; translators, like actors, appear to us under a persona, speaking to us with words that both are and are not their own.

-Esther, In Translation 

419 Sign languages

Top Ten Reasons

You Should Learn Sign Language 1. To be able to communicate effectively with the Deaf and hard of hearing. 2. To have fun learning a new and exciting visual language. 3. To look great on a resume and to open doors for new employment opportunities. 4. To spur intellectual growth and raise IQ. 5. To open new avenues for friendships and relationships. 6. To improve self-confidence and enhance communication skills. 7. To experience another avenue for expressing yourself artistically. 8. To broaden language acquisition in the early classroom. 9. To acquire the skill of nonverbal communication, body language, and facial expressions. 10. To learn a new language that can satisfy high school or college modern and foreign language requirements.

-Irene Duke, The Everything Sign Language Book: American Sign Language Made Easy... All new photos! (Everything®) 

420 English & Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

I love to Read Books

Ic lufræden beereeding (My attempt to translate this phrase into the Anglo-Saxon language)

423 Dictionaries of standard English

In the process of learning how to write a dictionary, lexicographers must face the Escher-esque logic of English and its speakers. What appears to be a straightforward word ends up being a linguistic fun house of doors that open into air and staircases that lead to nowhere. People’s deeply held convictions about language catch at your ankles; your own prejudices are the millstone around your neck. You toil onward with steady plodding, losing yourself to everything but the goal of capturing and documenting this language. Up is down,*2 bad is good,*3 and the smallest words will be your downfall. You’d rather do nothing else. We approach this raucous language the same way we approach our dictionary: word by word.

-Kory Stamper, Word by Word 

“A very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society, and Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is indeed an honour and a pleasure to at long last make your acquaintance—for you must be, kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr. W. C. Minor?” There was a brief pause, a momentary air of mutual embarrassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. A distant clank of keys. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and he spoke: “I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident.”

-Simon Winchester,  The Professor and the Madman 

424 No longer used—formerly English thesauruses

425 Grammar of standard English

428 Standard English usage (Prescriptive linguistics)

What makes a word weird? It would be convenient to say that it’s as ineffable as whatever it is that makes art Art, but that’s not quite true. Words are weird because they have odd sounds, or an abundance of syllables, or a completely gratuitous k, j, q, z, or x. Words are often weird because they mean something weird. They let you see, for as long as

you care to dwell on them, some of the truly bizarre things that people have had, done, used, invented, feared, or thought.

What makes a word wonderful is ineffable. It has to hit you like a good joke, or a satisfying denouement, or the scent of something tantalizing in the air. It makes you want to go off on tangents, or rants, or wild goose chases. It adds something, not just to your vocabulary (since you may never even speak or write any of these wonderful words), but to your being. Like anything wonderful (to abuse etymology), it fills you with wonder. It opens vistas. There are plenty of words that are weird without being the least bit wonderful—nectocalyx is orthographically weird, but meaning as it does ‘the swimming-bell that forms the natatory organ in many hydrozoans’ it is sadly lacking on the wonder scale. There are wonderful words, such as brio and luminescent, which long familiarity has deprived of any weirdness. Finding a truly weird and wonderful word is like meeting a gorgeous person who is also a good cook and will help you move.

Ever since Adam assigned names to all the animals, we human beings have managed to come up with labels for almost everything on this planet—and beyond. Many of these names are so obscure that no one except dictionary editors knows them. The rest of us are reduced to referring to these things with words that mean “that object I don’t know the name for.” We have managed to come up with more than thirty ways of signifying that for which we don’t have a name, including doohickey, gigamaree, thingumajog, whatchamacallit, and, as you’ll soon discover in this book, curwhibble. More Weird and Wonderful Words provides a remedy for that tongue-tangled state. It will help you fill in the semantic holes of all those doohickeys and whatchamacallits and brush bursting color onto the patches of blank space in your picture of the world.

-Erin McKean, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words . Oxford University Press. Kindle

430 German and related languages

Ich lese gern Bücher

440 French & related Romance languages

J'aime lire des livres

450 Italian, Dalmatian, Romanian, Rhaetian, Sardinian, Corsican

amo leggere libri

460 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician

amo leer libros

470 Latin & related Italic languages

Amo legere libris

480 Classical Greek & related Hellenic languages

Μου αρέσει να διαβάζω βιβλία

Mou arései na diavázo vivlía

490 Other languages

I Love Reading Books

Arabic: أنا أحب قراءة الكتب /'ana 'uhibu qara'at alkutub

Bulgarian: Обичам да чета книги/Obicham da cheta knigi

Chinese: 我喜欢读书 / Wǒ xǐhuān dúshū

Danish: Jeg elsker at læse bøger

Esperanto: Mi amas legi librojn

Filipino:  Gustung-gusto kong magbasa ng mga libro

Galician: Encántame ler libros

Haitian Creole: Mwen renmen li liv

Hebrew: אני אוהבת לקרוא ספרים

Irish:  Is breá liom leabhair a léamh

Japanese: 私は本を読むのが大好き /Watashi wa hon o  yomu no ga daisuki

Klingon: paq laD qamuSHa'

Lithuanian: Aš mėgstu skaityti knygas

Morse Code:  ..     .-.. --- ...- .     .-. . .- -.. .. -. --.     -... --- --- -.- ...

Norwegian: Jeg elsker å lese bøker

Old English: ic pro myne wordsomnung {books}  (This is the Best I could find…)

Polish: kocham czytać książki

Queretaro Otomi: Di ho ga lei libros

Russian Я люблю читать книги/YA lyublyu chitat' knigi

Swedish: Jag älskar att läsa böcker

Turkish: Ben kitap okumayı severim

Ukrainian: Я люблю читати книги /YA lyublyu chytaty knyhy

Vietnamese: tôi thích đọc sách

Welsh: Dwi'n hoffi darllen llyfrau

Xhosa: Ndiyakuthanda ukufunda iincwadi

Yiddish: איך ליבע צו לייענען ביכער /ikh libe tsu leyenen bikher

Zulu: Ngithanda ukufunda izincwadi

May golden light fall on your book at the times of your reading

Elvish: Nai laure lantuva parmalyanna lúmissen tengwielyo

500 Science:

 “The more that science unravels about the wonder of life and the universe, the more i am in are of it. the beauty and wonder of the universe and all that surrounds us offers proof of God. I like that idea”

― Ranya Idliby, The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding

“You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.

And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life.”

― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction

“Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.”

― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

510 Math:

The chapters in this book are filled with things like breath mints, pandas, popularity, gift wrapping, and spas. By the time you finish reading them, however, you’ll be a whiz at tons of pre-algebra topics, including integers, negative numbers, absolute value, inequalities, the distributive property, working with variables, word problems, exponents, functions, graphing, and tons of ways to solve for x. Yep! In fact, these are the topics that tend to be the most confusing, and if you don’t understand them now, they can cause tons of trouble later in algebra. That’s right-they don’t just go away. So, let’s clear them up now, shall we?

Danica McKellar, Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss

"If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you."

— Steve Martin

“Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.”

― Aaron Sorkin, The Farnsworth Invention

“A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.”

^^^^^^^^^^

 “Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.”

― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

520 Astronomy:

Today was the last day of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague, and the final item on the agenda at the end of two weeks’ worth of discussion was a vote on what to do with Pluto. Everyone’s favorite ice ball was in imminent danger of being cast out of the pantheon of planets by the vote of astronomers assembled half a world away, and whatever happened would be big news around the globe.

In the days that followed, I would hear from many people who were sad about Pluto. And I understood. Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.

-Mike Brown, I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.

GUY: Would you baptize an extraterrestrial? That is one of the questions people ask us all the time here at the Vatican Observatory … along with questions about the Star of Bethlehem, the beginning and end of the universe, Galileo, Pluto, black holes, killer asteroids, and all the other topics astronomers always get asked about. What is it about questions of this sort that raises such interest—and sometimes suspicion and fear—among so many people? Let’s face it, most people know we’re not likely to be running into any ETs anytime soon; nor is the exact nature of the Star of Bethlehem essential to any catechism or creed. But people care. They keep asking us. Why? This book is about what’s behind those questions.

PAUL: And this book is about what it’s like when science encounters faith on friendly, mutually respectful terms. Do you think we should reject any results of modern science that seem to

disagree with the Bible? Do you think that the Bible has greater authority than science, and that biblical faith should always get the last word over science? If so, this might not be the book for you. (But read on!) Do you think we should reject anything in the Bible that seems to be at odds with modern science? Do you think that science has greater authority than the Bible, and that science should always get the last word over biblical faith? If so, this might not be the book for you. (But read on!) Do you think that both science and faith should be taken seriously, but you struggle with how to hold science and faith together, with integrity? Do you find yourself tending to keep science and faith isolated from each other, in separate, watertight compartments, but you wish that science and faith didn’t have to “take turns” in your life? Then this book is for you. Read on!

-Guy Consolmagno, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?

530 Physics

537 Electricity & electronics

540 Chemistry & allied sciences

550 Earth sciences & geology

551 Geology, hydrology, meteorology

Weather

552 Petrology

553 Economic geology

560 Paleontology Fossils & prehistoric life

571 Physiology & related subjects

572 Biochemistry

576 Genetics and evolution

577 Ecology

578 Natural history of organisms & related subjects

579 Natural history of microorganisms, fungi, algae

580 Plants

589 No longer used—formerly Forestry

590 Animals(Zoology)

592 Invertebrates

593 Miscellaneous marine & seashore invertebrates

594 Mollusca & Molluscoidea

595 Arthropoda

596 Chordata

597 Cold-blooded vertebrates

598 Aves (Birds)

599 Mammalia (Mammals)

600 Technology

610 Medicine & health

611 Human anatomy, cytology, histology

612 Human physiology

613 Personal health & safety

Health/Fitness:

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”

― Markus Herz

So your longevity is paradoxically tied to the fate of these ancient organisms— the oldest parts of you have the power to help keep you young. It all goes back to the bacteria’s need to survive and pass on their DNA. Your body is essentially a condominium for your microbiome or, as I like to call them, your bugs. You are their home. And as you’ll soon learn, if you provide a nice, hospitable home for them, they will be exceptionally good tenants. They’ll keep the utilities running efficiently, the plumbing in tip-top shape, and even the exterior paint fresh. On the other hand, if you feed them foods they do not thrive on, allow squatters to move in and take over, and let the foundation rot, they’ll give up and let the rest of you decay right along with it. Our relationship with our bugs has always been, and continues to be, symbiotic; in other words, their health is dependent on you and vice versa. You take care of them, and they’ll take care of you— for the long term.

-Steven R Gundry, MD, The Longevity Paradox (The Plant Paradox) 

FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS, I’ve been assembling a list of things I need to do to improve my health. It’s an intimidatingly long list. Fifty-three pages. Here’s a sample: • Eat leafy green vegetables • Do forty minutes of aerobic exercise a day • Meditate several times a week • Watch baseball (lowers blood pressure, according to one study) • Nap (good for the brain and heart) • Hum (prevents sinus infections) • Win an Academy Award (A bit of a long shot, I know. But studies show Oscar winners live three years longer than non–Oscar winners.) • Keep my apartment at sixty-two degrees, which makes my body burn more calories a day • Buy a potted Areca palm plant (filters dirty air) • Lift weights to muscle exhaustion • Become an Okinawan woman (another long shot) And on and on. By the way, I’ve printed this list in nine-point Papyrus font, because I found a study that says hard-to-read fonts improve memorization. I want to do everything on my list because my quest isn’t just to be a little bit healthier. My quest isn’t to lose a couple of pounds. My quest is to turn my current self—a mushy, easily winded, moderately sickly blob—into the embodiment of health and fitness. To become as healthy as humanly possible.

― A J Jacobs, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection

The food we eat is like fuel. It gives our bodies the energy they need to function well. If you don’t make sure that the fuel you pump into your body is of the right quality or quantity, you just won’t feel as healthy as you could.

We all have up to 100 Trillion cells in our bodies, each one demanding a constant supply of daily nutrients in order to function optimal. Food affects all those cells, and by extension every aspect of our being: Mood, Energy Levels, Food Cravings, Thinking Capacity, Sex Drive, Sleeping Habits and General Health. In short, Healthy Eating is the Key to Well-Being.

-Gillian McKeith You Are What You Eat: The Plan That Will Change Your Life (2004)

Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.”

“Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs has all been comprehensively distorted by modernity.”

― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep 

613.023 Professions hygiene and health

613.1 Role of the natural environment

613.2 Diet (food hygiene, nutrition, diet, nutritional value of food and beverages)

613.4 Cleanliness Care (hygiene and personal cleanliness, personal care)

613.62   Role of unnatural environment (housing, housing, temperature)

613.62 Hygiene in the business (industrial hygiene)

613.66 Self Defense

613.7 Condition physique (bodybuilding, fitness, forme physique)[4]

613.7046 Hatha yoga, yoga physique[5]

613.71 Exercising, sports (aerobics, sauna, appearance surveillance and physical form)[6]

613.79 Relaxation, sleep[7]

614 Forensic medicine; incidence of injuries, wounds, disease; public preventive medicine

615 Pharmacology and therapeutics

Diseases

616 Death:

“People don’t gather after a death to mourn, but rather to reaffirm why life matters and to remember to exult in the only one we’ll ever have. We hold funerals, memorials, celebrations—whatever you want to call them—to seek and to find the heart of the matter of this trip we call Life.”

― Heather Lende, Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer

“Though their doctors dutifully record such distinct entities as stroke, or cardiac failure, or pneumonia, these aged folk have in fact died because something in them has worn out. Long before the days of scientific medicine, everyone understood this. On July 5, 1814, when he was seventy-one years old, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the seventy-eight-year-old John Adams, "But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for awhile, all will at length surcease motion.”

― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”

― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

617 Surgery, regional medicine, dentistry, ophthalmology, otology, audiology

618 Gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics, geriatrics

620 Engineering & Applied operations  Space exploration

622 Mining & related operations

624 Civil engineering

629 Space Exploration:

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

— Neil Armstrong

“In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success.

In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.”

― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

629.045 Navigators –

 “Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.”

― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

630  Farming:

“No one seemed to think it was odd that a Dumpster-diving urban pig farmer was in their midst. In fact, I came to learn that the restaurant industry was filled with other obsessive freaks like Samin, who would never buy a factory-made pickle. I was just another one of those freaks.”

― Novella Carpenter, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

“‎A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.”

― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

630 Agriculture & related technologies Gardening

631 Specific techniques; apparatus, equipment, materials

632 Plant injuries, diseases, pests

633 Field & plantation crops

634 Orchards, fruits, forestry

635 Garden crops (Horticulture)

Gardening:

AS LABOR DAY APPROACHED, Anne and I were flush with excitement. We had signed a contract, made a down payment for the construction phase, and spent our idle minutes running our fingers over the smooth blueprints and poring over seed catalogs. One moonless night in August, we grabbed some blankets and lay on our backs in the tall grass in the garden-to-be, touching hands, looking at the constellations, discussing what to plant. We were going to have a two-thousand-square-foot garden next year! To a couple of former city dwellers, this seemed like a small farm. No more agonizing decisions over whether to plant squash or lettuce. We could plant everything. I fancied myself a small farmer, self-sufficient in vegetables for at least several months of the year, and longer for storage crops like potatoes and winter squash. With the occasional shooting star shamelessly egging us on, Anne topped my ambitions with her romantic dreams of canning, making the garden’s bounty last twelve months of the year. I responded with homemade sun-dried tomatoes, tasting of sunshine and acidic sweetness.

“Fresh blueberries,” Anne moaned, “that turn your lips blue.”

“Cherry tomatoes,” I countered. “Popped whole into your mouth.”

Before long we were rolling in the summer grass, our way of saying farewell to the baseball field with its little vegetable patch and welcoming the kitchen garden. With these tantalizing visions dangling before us, we didn’t mind sacrificing the last few late tomatoes of the year, ripping out the plants and disassembling the beds in anticipation of Big Machinery that would be arriving any day.

Labor Day arrived. No Big Machinery.

-William Alexander, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden

“Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities.”

― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

636 Animal husbandry

637 Processing dairy & related products

638 Insect culture

639 Hunting, fishing, conservation, related technologies

640 Home & family management

Food & drink  Cooking  FOOD

642 Meals & table service

641 Cooking:

Nerdy Nummies combines two things I love with all my heart: geek culture and baking. Video games, science fiction, math, and comics were just a few of the things people considered “nerdy” when I was growing up; now they inspire every recipe you’ll find inside this book. From a Periodic Table of Cupcakes to Moon Phase Macarons, there are plenty of sweet treats for the geek in all of us!

The internet is a truly amazing place and I feel incredibly humbled by the outpouring of support I’ve received over the years. Having a direct connection with people all over the world is incredible and it’s why I enjoy doing Nerdy Nummies so much!

Astrophysicist and fellow baker Neil deGrasse Tyson lived long and prospered with an awesome Star Trek cake; friend and digital pioneer, Michelle Phan, created a batch of Super Smash Brothers cupcakes; fitness guru Cassey Ho made healthy black bean Superhero Burgers; and comedy duo Smosh enjoyed Vegan Mini Donut Holes.

-Rosanna Pansino, The Nerdy Nummies Cookbook: Sweet Treats for the Geek in All of Us

I want to stress that Grace Before Meals is truly our movement. It takes you and me to spread this simple but profound message of strengthening relationships around the dinner table. At first, some of my brother priests teased me about the movement being a “schtick.” But, as soon as they hear the theology that supports our movement, they begin to realize that perhaps bite-sized theology is a great way to teach people about faith, hope, love, and life. There’s an information overload in our world. When do we have time to discuss and digest all that’s being crammed down our throats? Well, God gives each of us an almost sacred place to be disciples (students) and to learn the way Jesus taught his followers—around the dinner table!

-Fr. Leo Patalinghug, Grace Before Meals 

643 Home Improvement:

A building permit is your formal permission to proceed with your renovation. A permit outlines what the owners are doing to their home, from changes to structure to how many electrical outlets they’re planning on installing to where the plumbing will go and how it’s going to be run. Having a permit does not mean the work is going to be beautiful, it does not mean it is going to be level, and it does not mean it is going to be square. What the permit shows is that your planned renovation or upgrade complies with the building code and local planning ordinances.

-Mike Holmes, Make It Right

 “The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.”

― Marie Kondō, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Dear Home Improvement Honey, banish the brutal level of light emanating from the lanterns hanging near your front door. When did Escape from Alcatraz become the inspiration for the light levels outside our homes? What part of a prison yard do you find attractive? Dangerous and ugly, blazing bare bulbs emit enough light to force visitors to confess to any manor of crimes. I can’t tell you how many flower beds I’ve stumbled into while shielding my eyes from a painfully incandescent glare from too much and too strong outdoor lighting. Even more upsetting, I’ve gouged the leather on a pair of gorgeous Prada shoes when I misjudged a step while blinded by spotlights beckoning me along a walkway.

-James Swan, 101 Things I Hate About Your House: A Premier Designer Takes You on a Room-by-Room Tour to Transform Your Home from Faux Pas to Fabulous

Real men don't use instructions, son. Besides, this is just the manufacturer's opinion on how to put this together.

-Tim Allen, Home Improvement

Housing & household equipment

644 Household utilities

645 Household furnishings

646 Sewing, clothing, management of personal and family life

647 Management of public households (Institutional housekeeping)

648 Housekeeping

649 Child rearing; home care of people with disabilities & illnesses

650 Business: & public relations

“If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.”

― Jason Fried, Rework

“As you enter this place of work please choose to make today a great day. Your colleagues, customers, team members, and you yourself will be thankful. Find ways to play. We can be serious about our work without being serious about ourselves. Stay focused in order to be there when your customers and team members most need you. And should you feel your energy lapsing, try this surefire remedy: Find someone who needs a helping hand, a word of support, or a good ear—and make their day.”

― Stephen C. Lundin, Fish!: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results

If his business demonstrated grace and graciousness, then maybe in the process, people would discover the truth of what he believed. But he was not going to lead with his faith. He reminded us, Chick-fil-A is not a church or a ministry: “I’m not going to put scripture on packaging or on the bottom of cups. We’re not going to put evangelical material in our restaurants. I want people to discover what we believe because of how we treat them. Jesus didn’t say, ‘I expect you to be a bullhorn.’ He said, ‘I expect you to be salt. I expect you to be light.’” Being closed on Sundays was the most overt “pronouncement” Truett would make. When he stood in front of audiences and said, “I have never seen a conflict between biblical principles and good business practice,” he was attempting to live out grace and truth—and grace came before truth. Through his business and his life, he wanted healthy relationships where he could influence a few hundred teenagers, eventually a few thousand campers every year, and then tens of thousands of young team members in restaurants. Those were opportunities he probably never dreamed would happen.

-Steve Robinson, Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A 

650 Management & auxiliary services

651 Office services

657 Accounting

658 General management

659 Advertising & public relations

660 Chemical engineering & related technologies

670 Manufacturing

690 Construction of buildings

700 Arts and Entertainment

"In his 1999 Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that “beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.” There is “an ethic, even a ‘spirituality’ of artistic service which contributes [to] the life and renewal of a people,” because “every genuine art form, in its own way, is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world."

— Bishop Robert E. Barron (Exploring Catholic Theology: Essays on God, Liturgy, and Evangelization)

Another crucial bit of advice for would-be film critics, cribbed from elsewhere: BE INTERESTED IN STUFF OTHER THAN MOVIES.

Learn about art and music, world cuisine, quantum physics, baseball history, whatever interests you. Travel. Meet people. Play chess, poker, Frisbee golf, Scrabble, anything. Read old books. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Movies can be a jumping-off point for learning about all kinds of things, but you also need to bring to them a world of experience in order to get out of them everything they have to offer, to have perspective on them, to having something to say about them.

Nobody gains perspective in a vacuum, or only by watching movies. You have to live and grow as a person. As with watching movies, reading and writing, you can’t rush this. It takes time.

—Deacon  Steven D. Greydanus.

 “Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”

― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

720  Architecture: 

Hunt was no stranger to grand undertakings, no dilettante in the realm of Gilded Age extravagance, and his reputation was known far beyond US shores. He was the first American to enroll in and graduate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His studies there enabled him to work on the renovations of that city’s Louvre Museum. Back in the United States, he eventually cofounded the American Institute of Architects, and his eye would influence many of the most evocative and enduring structures of the time, from private homes to urban designs: The pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The great hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The plan for Columbia University. He was an incomparable talent who practiced his art at a time when numerous patrons were lining up to pay top dollar for it. He had created some of the most elaborate and admired homes on the East Coast. If architectural excess were a religion, Hunt was surely its patron saint, placing the most ornate of roofs over the heads of the city’s elite from cradle to crypt.

-Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation's Largest Home

My house is roughly the size of a tree stump—a big and tall tree stump, like a giant sequoia that you could drive your car through and then drink hot cocoa on the other side like a tourist, but still a stump of a house, which is why I am afraid of fire. Think about it: A small fire erupts in the living room, which is also the kitchen and dining room, which is also the bedroom and bathroom. It has detonated out of the heater due to some small “oops” in the machinery that causes the tiniest flicker of a flame to brush into the smallest psssst of a gas leak. Almost instantly, the fire is massive, a monster devouring the rafters and side walls, collapsing the roof, exploding the canned goods, and buckling the floorboards. In a matter of seconds, my dog and I are left with nowhere to run because there is no other room but this single, highly combustible, highly condensed space the size of a Yule log.

Fire was nothing I’d considered while building my house—not while I was reading about wood grain, kiln-dried lumber, or sustainable forest products; and not while I was hefting great lengths of four-hundred-year-old cedar onto and off my car or even while I was pulling wood out of a pile labeled “Firewood.” It never entered my mind as I installed the wood cabinets, the oak toilet seat, and the old fir door, or while I picked sawdust out of my hair and lovingly sanded the smoky smell off the cedar floorboards that had survived someone else’s house fire.

-Dee Williams, The Big Tiny

730 Sculpture, ceramics, & metalwork

Graphic arts & decorative arts  Knitting

740  Knitting/Crafts and other hobbies

Hey, Scrappy! How lucky are we to be among the few, the proud, the scrapbookers? I  truly believe that scrapbooking is the most powerful and meaningful hobby on the face of the earth. And it's fun, too! I mean, who doesn't love playing with colorful, inspiring  products and pairing them with photos of and stories about our favorite people, places, and things? But even scrapbookers can sometimes hit a lull. We get overwhelmed with ideas, stories, photos, and (of course) patterned paper. But we don't have to sit in the swamp of despair. Sometimes all we need is a lifeline in the form of some advice or inspiration. And that is what this short book is intended to provide: A helping hand and dose of wisdom when you're feeling blah, bored, or boring.

-Tracy Banks, Profiles in Scrapbooking: Inspiration, Wisdom, and Advice for Your Memory-Keeping Journey .

“It isn't the shape of the designs or the points or the batting, it's the love you sew into your quilt that is your true legacy.”

― Lisa Boyer, Stash Envy: And Other Quilting Confessions And Adventures

For potters, opening a kiln is like witnessing magic. There’s a moment when you can do no more than bask in the glittering, gleaming light of the pots on the top shelf, reflective with amazing glaze. After a good firing, we reveal the pieces in the kiln one by one, slowly, contemplating the subtleties and calling our friends over to take a look. As ceramic artists, we live for this moment. As humans, we’re filled with joy when we create something beautiful. On the other hand, a bad firing can ruin your day. The attempt to create something beautiful can seem a waste of time and effort when we fail. It leads to negativity as we question our competence, react with disgust, and use unprintable language to describe the results.

-Gabriel Kline,; John Britt,   Amazing Glaze: Techniques, Recipes, Finishing, and Firing

GLASS IS WONDERFUL. When declared with feeling, this statement expresses the intense passion that I feel for my craft. It is, however, a woefully inadequate way to start a book about glass art techniques; it expresses neither the joy and opportunities for creative expression and satisfaction that can be gained from creating glass art, nor the time, effort, and commitment that we must give to learn techniques, develop designs, and create a unique piece. The challenge is always there: When we start and when we finish, glass is hard and stiff. It’s only when we are working with glass that we can cut it, melt it, shape it, arrange it, and manipulate it. Many times, it’s an unforgiving material. Yet the beauty in glass has captured hearts and hands for thousands of years. While glass art techniques were once trade secrets, jealously kept within families, today the materials, tools, and training are easily within reach of almost anyone interested in learning the craft. We can create pieces that are extraordinarily useful or simply decorative, of almost any size. Glass, I believe, has something for everyone.

-Cecilia Cohen, The Glass Artist's Studio Handbook (Studio Handbook Series) 

“I am a writer who does not enjoy writing. I can find innumerable ways to avoid it. But, to rip off Dorothy Parker, nothing else—nothing—gives me the same thrill as having written. I’m the same way with knitting. The process is fine, mind you, and keeps my hands busy. But nothing else—nothing—gives me the rush that I get from finishing something.

"The parallels between writing and knitting go even further. Like writing, knitting has a finite number of raw ingredients. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Those letters can combine to give you David Foster Wallace or freshman composition papers. There are only two basic stitches: the knit and the purl. Those stitches can add up to a gorgeously complicated sweater or a pastel pink toilet paper cozy. The difference is in the mind that shapes them.”

― Adrienne Martini, Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously

“If you were ever dumped after knitting a guy a sweater, consider the possibility that the problem was with the sweater, not you. The recipient probably took one look at the thing, imagined a lifetime of having to pretend to like (and wear) this sweater and others of its like, and saw no choice but to flee into the night”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Maybe, just maybe, those six balls are a scarf and hat that get tucked away for years and long after I’m gone someone pulls them out and says, “Remember how Grammy was with all the wool? Remember how she knit all the time?” fingering the soft wool and pondering who I was and what I did while I was here.”

― Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, Knitting Rules!: The Yarn Harlot Unravels the Mysteries of Swatching, Stashing, Ribbing & Rolling to Free Your Inner Knitter

What is Crafting?

Crafting includes a whole host of activities associated with skillful attempts at making useful things with your hands and resulting in stocking stuffers, grab bag items and painted rocks. Some crafts have been practiced for centuries. These crafts were created using skills passed down from generation to generation and were motivated by necessity, such as baskets and pottery or artistic expression such as more baskets and more poetry. Today, there is a much more leisurely attitude toward crafting and virtually anyone without a job and access to pipe cleaners can join the elite society of crafters.

-Amy Sedaris, Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People Hardcover – November 2, 2010

“ My dad takes most of the pictures in our family, and he makes scrapbooks. This means he gets to figure out what's important for us to remember... I guess my mom could make a scrapbook, but she doesn't. And I could do it and so could my brothers, but then we would need extra pictures. Plus we're just kids and we don't have time for that. I know the scrapbooks we'd make would be different from Dad's. But the person who does the work gets to write the history. ”

― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Short

740 Graphic arts

741 Drawing & drawings

742 Perspective in drawing

743 Drawing & drawings by subject

744 Not assigned or no longer used

745 Decorative arts

746 Textile arts

747 Interior decoration

748 Glass

749 Furniture & accessories

750 Art: Painting

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Developing your voice can be a lifetime journey, a continual process of discovery and reinvention. As you get older, your values and drives may change and you may learn new techniques—and all this affects your voice and the work you create. Everyone’s progress will be different, and there is always a bit of trial and error involved. If you create work that doesn’t feel authentic, that’s also an important realization—and helps eliminate what you shouldn’t be doing.

-Lisa Congdon, Art, Inc. 

“We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colors as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colors in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colors.”

― Ernst Gombrich

“There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms.” ”

― James Gurney, Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

“I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.”

― Irving Stone, Lust for Life

752 Colors:

“Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors.” But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them.”

― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream.”

― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

The Gatherers saw her travels in her eyes, for wherever she went, they absorbed colors. She drank in the forest’s full spectrum—green pheasant feathers, wild purple lilacs, red fur of lurkdashers, and dandelions both sun yellow and wisp white. When she appeared among the grumbling, half-awake workers in the morning, her eyes glinted emerald, ringed with red, remnants of the sunrise. Sometimes they reflected that light late into the afternoon.

― Jeffrey Overstreet, Auralia's Colors

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

 A particular fad for a colour began taking hold of Paris in the second half of 1857, and reached London the following year. The colour was mauve, the French name for the common mallow plant.

New colours had been discovered by chance since ancient times, and some magnificent myths had evolved. A sheep dog belonging to Hercules, while walking along a beach in Tyre, bit into a mollusk which turned his mouth the colour of coagulated blood. This became known as Royal or Tyrian purple. It brought prosperity to Tyre around 1500 BC, and for centuries remained the most exl=clusive animal dye money could buy. It was colour of high achievement and ostentatious wealth, and came to symbolize sovereignty and the highest offices of the legal system. Within Jewish practice, the dye was used on the fringes of prayer shawls; in the army, the wearing of purple woolen strips was used to denote rank. Purple was also the colour of Cleopatra’s barge, and Julius Caesar decreed that the colour should be worn only by the emperor and his household.

-Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (2002)

Television: I hate television.  I hate it as much as peanuts.  But I can't stop eating peanuts. 

-Orson Welles

760 Printmaking & prints

770 Photography:

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

― Ansel Adams

The name Kim Anderson is synonymous throughout the world with photographs of children that lovingly reflect the world of adults. These delicate images lead the viewer back into his or her own past and conjure up the wonderful moments of becoming a grown-up. The children’s delicate faces, large eyes and natural demeanors capture our attention, stimulate our imagination and lets us once again take part in those unforgettable moments of childhood. Through these photographs, we discover the joy and tenderness that can only be conveyed by children.

-Kim Anderson, Endless Dreams

If there’s so much beauty and diversity in one country, what about the rest of the world? I wondered. I realized that the wonderful women of our planet need much more attention, and that true beauty is more than what we so often see in the media. In that moment, I started to dream again, and found the strength to break from my comfort zone, quit my job, and go back to photography. I started to travel, take photos and, little by little, I regained my self-confidence.

-Mihaela Noroc, The Atlas of Beauty 

This mix of photography and writing caused HONY to grow even faster. This book is the result of nearly three years of work. I walked several thousand miles to find these portraits. I stopped over ten thousand people on the street. It was exhausting work but I enjoyed every minute of it. The people in these pages are very dear to me. By allowing me to take their photo, each one of them helped me to realize my dream. And I am so thankful for their participation.

― Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York

777 Film:

Movie Making: The rise of original, risk-taking television is directly tied to the decline of original, risk-taking filmmaking and the dawn of the franchise age of film—one in which studios no longer coddle creative talent, release movies of every type for everyone, or pride themselves for taking risks on quality and new ideas. Instead, movie studios now exist primarily for the purpose of building and supporting branded franchises that continue in sequels, toys, and theme-park attractions.

― Ben Fritz, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies

While most of us are uncomfortable judging, say, Japanese calligraphy or a Wagnerian opera based on our limited exposure to those art forms, we are all experts on Hollywood simply by virtue of having seen hundreds or thousands of movies in our lifetimes. Few moviegoers have qualms comparing and contrasting The English Patient with, say, Scary Movie. But from inside Hollywood, what you see is an imperfect system that contains vast armies of smart, usually young people in their twenties and thirties, working tremendously hard to make mainly mediocre movies. Why? Because moviemaking looks deceptively easy, but is, in fact, very, very hard. It’s a highly collaborative endeavor with dozens and often hundreds of people involved. Perfecting your craft to work in tandem with other craftsmen can and does take many years. That’s why even great fiction writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker were never better than mediocre screenwriters.

-Michael Lent, Breakfast with Sharks

As a child, movies were a humongous part of my life. I wore out my Star Wars VHS tapes so badly that no amount of “tracking” could fix the little bouncy white lines at the bottom of the TV. But it wasn’t until that warm day in the summer of ’02 that I had an epiphany.

Movies were made by artists.

Directors.

Writers.

Actors.

Editors.

Cinematographers.

Movies were shot and cut together by someone.

A composer wrote music to seamlessly blend with it.

Someone arranged lights and objects within a shot to create visual synergy.

I have a perfect memory of returning home that day and bounding toward our apartment while saying to my mother, “I want to do that! I want to make a movie like that.”

After seeing Signs in theaters five times, I became fascinated with filmmaking. I didn’t just watch movies anymore, I studied them. The shot structure, the moment where a character reaches their arc, how a clever editor can heighten the tension with just the right cut. Everything! I lived and breathed movies.

Chris Stuckmann, The Film Buff's Bucket List: The 50 Movies of the 2000s to See Before You Die

Movie (Script) writing: So, when you create a story, keep the character’s conflict at the forefront of your screenplay’s starting point. In other words, don’t obsess over a point you want to make or a theme, as Lajos Egri states in his popular book The Art of Dramatic Writing. He insists that the writer should start with a premise, such as “Love Conquers All” or “Foolishness Leads to Poverty.” The problem with the premise as a starting point is that you will inevitably create contrived situations and characters to make your theme become a story. But it usually ends up being phony or heavy handed. You’re hitting your audience with a premise that’s obviously not based on reality but on a point you want to make. A much better place to start is observing (or stealing) from real life. Collect anecdotes. You will want to observe real people around you and, more important, their problems, their situations, their conflicts. Pay close attention to the people who cause those problems. In movies, we call these problem-givers the antagonists. You should study both the antagonists and the protagonists like a scientist. You don’t make judgments. You don’t want them to be tools of your theme. So become like an objective scientist and research the human behavior of your characters so they can be as real as possible.- Mardik Martin

-Sherry Ellis, Now Write! Screenwriting (Now Write! Writing Guide Series

I think that’s because writing a screenplay is part art and part science. The art part of screenwriting comes naturally to me. The story. The characters. The action. But the science of screenwriting — the transitions, the parentheticals, the sluglines, all those tools the screenwriter uses to communicate the vision he has in his head — that part doesn’t come naturally to me. For many years I didn’t know how to use those elements. I knew what they were, of course, but I didn’t feel I had mastered them. Sometimes I would envision a scene in my head and wonder, “How do I explain this? How do I put this scene on the page so other people will see the same scene that I see?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A screenplay is like a map to a story. If you don’t do it right, it won’t tell the story you intended. Imagine writing a song. If you don’t put the notes on the musical chart the way professional musicians are used to seeing them, they’re not going to play the song you heard in your head and you’re not going to be happy when you hear it. If you give a script to a studio that isn’t written using standard Hollywood format, it may be a good idea, with good dialogue and action, but it doesn’t come across the way you intended.

-Christopher Riley, The Hollywood Standard, 

Movie Critics: “Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.”

― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies III

 “When it comes to the selections, I heard several observers claim that the Academy was embracing “nostalgia” by honoring The Artist and Hugo. Give me a break! Hugo represents cutting-edge storytelling by a world-class director—in 3-D, no less. The Artist dares to revisit a form of cinema that was abandoned in the late 1920s. The Academy members admired these films for making the past seem immediate and relevant. That has nothing to do with nostalgia; it has everything to do with great moviemaking, which is what the Academy Awards are all about.”

― Leonard Maltin

A camel is standing alone in the middle of the Gobi Desert, wind whipping back her golden mane. And she is singing. I’m not kidding. I’m looking at her. The cinema is dark and I’m squinting at the pale pages of the notebook in my hand. Then I look up into the vibrant screen and stare at this beautiful redhead—this camel singing somewhere in Mongolia at dusk—and my vision blurs through tears. No, this isn’t a goggle-eyed, knobby-kneed Disney camel. This is a living, breathing camel standing in the lavender dusk of the shifting dunes, staring into the distance and singing.

-Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly 

Movie Audience:

“I wish we could go to the movies."

I stared at him. "We're in a creepy dungeon. There's a chance I might die in the next few hours. You are going to die in the next few hours. And if you had one wish, it would be to catch a movie?”

― Rachel Hawkins, Demonglass

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

-Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“The idea of going to the movies made Hugo remember something Father had once told him about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new. Hugo's father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.”

― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

790 Television

TV and Movies:

 I actually think film and TV are sort of the same thing now. To me they're all motion pictures. There's a camera, a script, other actors and a director. Doing a sitcom is a little different. It's kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion - the camera's on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.

-Alan Ruck

 “To say that film and television are the same thing is to say poetry and the novel are the same simply because they are words written on a page.”

― J. Andrew Schrecker

TV Critics: The genre that The Sopranos had critiqued and cannibalized—the mob drama—was considered a serious one, tied directly to the Best-Film-Ever, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The genres that Buffy mashed together (teen soaps, vampire horror, situation comedy, superhero comics) were not. Buffy was disco; The Sopranos was rock. When you were watching The Sopranos, you were symbolically watching side by side with a middle-aged man, even if you were a teen girl. When you watched Buffy, your invisible companion was a fifteen-year-old girl, even if you were a middle-aged man. From my perspective, both of these shows were equally radical interventions into their medium: One of them was a mind-blowing mob drama about postwar capitalism and boomer masculinity, the other a blazing feminist genre experiment about mortality and sex. But only one of these shows transcended television. The other one was television.

-Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch

TV Writing:

Grey’s Anatomy was my first real job in television. Having a show I created be my first real TV job meant that I knew nothing about working in TV when I began running my own show. I asked every TV writer I bumped into what this job was like, what being in charge of a season of a network television drama was like. I got loads of great advice, most of which made clear that every show was a very different, specific experience. With one exception: every single writer I met likened writing for television to one thing—laying track for an oncoming speeding train.

-Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

Memorable TV:

Abraham Lincoln once said that, 'If you're a racist, I will attack you with the North.' And those are the principles that I carry with me in the workplace.

— Michael Scott (Steve Carell), The Office, Season 1: Diversity Day

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone."

— Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories)

              

Scooby-Doo and the gang are casually driving in the Mystery Machine—that flowery blue-green product of the late ’60s—while a calming voiceover soothes us. They seem at peace … but not for long. A shiny, intimidating car slams into the van, knocking the Scooby Gang off course. It’s white. There’s a sleek red “M” on the hood. It’s the Mach 5. The theme song for Speed Racer unexpectedly bursts forth, and the young racer, Speed—known as Gō Mifune in Japan—nods at the Scooby Gang as they fly off a cliff and explode.

-Chris Stuckmann, Anime Impact 

Father Ted: “Come on, Dougal, switch the television off. Chewing gum for the eyes!”

Father Dougal: “Oh, no thanks Ted, I’ve got these crisps here.”

-Fr. Ted

792 Theater:

About Theater:

“The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.”

― P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe

“Truth in theatre is always on the move. As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. it is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page. but unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is myth, we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time.

In everyday life, "if" is a fiction, in the theatre "if" is an experiment. In everyday life, "if" is an evasion, in the theatre "if" is the truth. When we are persuaded to believe in this truth then the theatre and life are one. This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work. To plays needs much work. But when we experiences the work as play, then it is not work anymore. A play is play.”

― Peter Brook

“Holy Dance of the Vampires, no! Dance of the Vampires!' (Instead of cursing, we shout out the titles of legendary Broadway flops.”

― Tim Federle, Better Nate Than Ever

Plays:

Ralph: They’ve found us! 

May: Who?  Who's found you?

Ralph: The time travelling Nazis.

May: Hang on?  There are time travelling Nazis?

Ralph: Yes!

May: That’s not good.

-Claire Demmer, A SNITCH IN TIME:  a time travelling comedy adventure: http://offthewallplays.com

 “How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Y'know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,— same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.

So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight.

See what I mean?

So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

Said by the Stage Manager”

― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?”

― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

780 Music

Music: “People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”

― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“Bach, Chopin, Schumann, these composers have mastered the art of listening. Richard hears Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” and every cell in his body has a broken heart and bare feet dancing in the moonlight. Playing Brahms is communing with God.”

― Lisa Genova, Every Note Played

“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”

― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

“Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer’s voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of “Green River” by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son”; the oboes in Beethoven’s Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience.”

― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

790 Recreational & performing arts

791 Public performances

792 Stage presentations

793 Indoor games & amusements

794 Indoor games of skill

795 Games of chance

796 Athletic & outdoor sports & games

797 Aquatic & air sports

798 Equestrian sports & animal racing

799 Fishing, hunting, shooting

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism

808 Short Story

“Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.”

― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

― Jack Kerouac

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

― Lorrie Moore

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

-O Henry, The Gift Of The Magi

810 American literature in English

811 Poetry

I have no sword, I have no plow;

I guess that makes me idle now.

There is no fishing net I own

I have no pastures in which to roam.

I have no vineyard in the sun.

I have no work I must get done.

I will soon have a college degree

But that does not give a job to me.

-Kristin Wilson, IDLE AND EDUCATED

“Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”

― St. Thomas Aquinas

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.”

― Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“The trouble with poetry is

that it encourages the writing of more poetry...”

― Billy Collins, The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems

“Deep in the meadow, hidden far away

A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray

Forget your woes and let your troubles lay

And when it's morning again, they'll wash away

Here it's safe, here it's warm

Here the daisies guard you from every harm

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place where I love you.”

― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“I opened a book and in I strode.

Now nobody can find me.

I've left my chair, my house, my road,

My town and my world behind me.

I'm wearing the cloak, I've slipped on the ring,

I've swallowed the magic potion.

I've fought with a dragon, dined with a king

And dived in a bottomless ocean.

― Julia Donaldson

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

― Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels

“She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.”

― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

 “We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”

― Nicola Yoon, The Sun is Also a Star

“Do a loony-goony dance

'Cross the kitchen floor,

Put something silly in the world

That ain't been there before.”

― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”

― Dylan Thomas

812 American drama in English

813 American fiction in English

814 Essays:

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts On Common Things

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”

― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

815 American speeches in English

816 American letters in English

817Humor

Writing Humor and being Funny

When you get pulled into a good piece of humor writing, something magical happens. The string of words in front of you ignites a spark that sends outlandish images and funny ideas racing into your brain like a lit fuse, culminating in an explosion of laughter.

Scott Dikkers, How to Write Funny: Your Serious, Step-By-Step Blueprint For Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing (How to Write Funny Book 1) 

Whenever ѕоmеоnе аrоund you tеllѕ a funnу ѕtоrу, cracks a joke оr ѕhаrеѕ a humоrоuѕ еxреrіеnсе, look bеуоnd the lаughtеr аnd spot thе intricacies of whаt іt took fоr thеm to mаkе еvеrуоnе lаugh. Frоm bоdу language tо voice tоnе pick uр tірѕ on how ѕоmеоnе was аblе tо sustain humor іn a соnvеrѕаtіоn. Create a рооl оf lеаrnіng, еxреrіеnсеѕ, аnd ѕlісеѕ of life аѕ you mееt and іntеrасt wіth dіffеrеnt сhаrасtеrѕ. Drаw іnѕріrаtіоn from their funnу ѕіdе and іnсоrроrаtе bіtѕ оf іt іntо your bеhаvіоr tо showcase your sense оf humоr in its full glory.

Laughing at уоurѕеlf wіll аrm уоu with the ability tо dесірhеr bеtwееn thіngѕ thаt аrе funnу аnd thе thіngѕ thаt аrе dull аnd bоrіng. It wіll аlѕо hеlр you drаw the lіnе bеtwееn bеіng sarcastically funny аnd ѕоundіng rudе.

Crеаtіng original humоr іѕ mоrе аbоut picking up іnсіdеntѕ from everyday lіfе and gіvіng thеm a соmіс twіѕt. In mundаnе еvеrуdау ѕіtuаtіоnѕ, humоr mау nоt lіе еxрlісіtlу оn the surface. But іtѕ true value іѕ showcased whеn ѕоmеоnе has thе sense аnd undеrѕtаndіng tо роіnt іt out.

-Francis Harrison, How To Be Funny: Releasing Your Inner Comedian and Improving Your Sense of Humor

One day a donkey fell into a well. The farmer couldn't get him out, so he knew he had to cover him up. He called in his neighbors, and they all started to throw dirt down the well, but instead of burying the animal, the donkey would shake the dirt off and take a step up. Pretty soon, the pile of dirt got so high that the donkey stepped over the edge of the well. Moralists use this story to preach that all our troubles can be stepping stones, that we shouldn't give up; instead shake it off and take a step up. Comedians, however, note that as soon as the disdained donkey got to the top he ran over and bit the farmer. Their moral is that if something goes wrong, try to cover your ass. It can come back and bite you.

-Mel Helitzer, Comedy Writing Secrets

Our plan, simply put, merges the best of both worlds, a mash-up of science

and comedy—two topics that don’t always get along. We’ll apply cutting-edge research techniques to the wide world of humor while subjecting the zingers, wisecracks, and punch lines we’ve all taken for granted to hard-and-fast analysis back in the lab. Along the way, we aim to answer tough questions that are bound to turn heads of scientists and comedians alike: Do comics need to come from screwed-up childhoods? What’s the secret to winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest? Why does being funny make you more attractive? Who’s got a bigger funny bone—men or women, Democrats or Republicans? What is, quantifiably, the funniest joke in the world? Is laughter really the best medicine? Can a joke ruin your life—or lead to revolution? And, most important of all, do the French love Jerry Lewis?

-Peter McGraw, The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny 

This book contains conversations with 21 top humor writers. If you’re wondering what constitutes a “top” humor writer, I would say an impressive résumé, deep respect from peers within the industry, and a willingness to sit still for five to fifteen hours over a period of two to three days—usually on the phone, or in front of the computer, or in the back of a coffee shop—to answer question after question, in greater and greater detail, from a total stranger. And always for no payment. (Please keep in mind that if you cannot find your favorite writer[s] in this book, perhaps he or she had “better things to be doing,” such as “spending time with family” or “earning a living.” Those are actual excuses that I was given, and, I have to admit, pretty good ones.)

-Mike Sacks, And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers--The New Unexpurgated Version!

Humor Writing

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

AS A PROFESSIONAL HUMORIST,

If you want to develop a sense of humor of your own, you need to learn some jokes. Notice I do not say “puns.” Puns are little “plays on words” that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

-Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

“It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.”

― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

 “But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.”

― Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.

-Will Rogers

818 American miscellaneous writings in English

819 Self-Broadcasting (I Assigned) No longer used—formerly Puzzle activities

"Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not."

— John Green

Blogging:  “Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

-Andrew Sullivan

“Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do. And if I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.”

― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“And so we arrive at a cosmic intersection, where an obscure topic of dubious relevance is written about by the type of weirdo who logs on to Wikipedia to write about obscure topics of dubious relevance.”

― Conor Lastowka, [Citation Needed]: The Best Of Wikipedia's Worst Writing

Podcasting: The beautiful thing about podcasting is it's just talking. It can be funny, or it can be terrifying. It can be sweet. It can be obnoxious. It almost has no definitive form. In that sense it's one of the best ways to explore an idea, and certainly much less limiting than trying to express the same idea in stand up comedy. For some ideas stand up is best, but it's really, really nice to have podcasts as well.

-Joe Rogan

"When I was a little kid, I thought it would be so cool to find a dead body. Once again, I blame Stephen King for this, along with my overactive imagination, as watching Stand by Me as a six-year-old gave me some crazy ideas about what an adventure finding a body would be. And also I associated River Phoenix and his all-encompassing gorgeousness with finding a body, so that didn’t help."

— Karen Kilgariff (Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide)

Youtube: The joy of YouTube is that you can create content about anything you feel passionate about, however silly the subject matter.

-Zoe Sugg

Hi, I’m Felicia Day. I’m an actor. That quirky chick in that one science fiction show? You know the one I’m talking about. I’m never on the actual poster, but I always have a few good scenes that make people laugh. As a redhead, I’m a sixth-lead specialist, and I practically invented the whole “cute but offbeat hacker girl trope on television. (Sorry. When I started doing it, it was fresh. I promise.) I’m the writer, producer, and actress/host/personality of hundreds of internet videos. Literally hundreds. I have a problem, guys (let’s talk more about it later). A lot of people know my work. And a lot of people do not. I like to refer to myself as “situationally recognizable.” It’s way better than “internet famous,” which makes me feel like I’m in the same category as a mentally challenged cat or a kid doing yo-yo tricks while riding a pogo stick. I know that kid, super talented. But the cat . . . not so much.

-Felicia Day, You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): A Memoir

“Don't be something you're not. Unless you can be a fabulous unicorn. Always be a fabulous unicorn.”

― PewDiePie, This Book Loves You

“When life throws a wrench in your plans, catch it and build an IKEA bookshelf.”

― Tyler Oakley, Binge

822 Shakespeare

"Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance."

-James Joyce, Ulysses

Brush up your Shakespeare

Start quoting him now

Brush up your Shakespeare

And the women you will wow

- Cole Porter

Actual Shakespeare:

“All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.”

― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.”

― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Inspired Shakespeare:

“You've never heard of the Trickster King?" Puck asked, shocked.

The girls shook their heads.

"The Prince of Fairies? Robin Goodfellow? The Imp?"

"Do you work for Santa?" Daphne asked.

"I'm a fairy, not an elf!" Puck roared. "You really don't know who I am! Doesn't anyone read the classics anymore? Dozens of writers have warned about me. I'm in the most famous of all of William Shakespeare's plays."

"I don't remember any Puck in Romeo and Juliet," Sabrina muttered, feeling a little amused at how the boy was reacting to his non-celebrity.

"Besides Romeo and Juliet!" Puck shouted. "I'm the star of a Midsummer Night's Dream!"

"Congratulation," Sabrina said flatly. "Never read it.”

― Michael Buckley, The Fairy-Tale Detectives

“- Be thou not technical with me,/Or else thine input valve may swift receive/a hearty helping of my golden foot.”

― Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope

 “I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush...

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?”

― Neil Gaiman

“A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.”

― Stephen King

“If Romeo had never met Juliet, maybe they both would have still been alive, but what they would have been alive for is the question Shakespeare wants us to answer.”

― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

Though Shakespeare is real, he is also elusive, defying our efforts to define him. Try as we might to pin him down, he always seems to get away. We don’t even know for certain what he looked like. The various paintings claiming to be portraits of him are most probably of someone else. In some ways the quest for the real Shakespeare can be likened to the quest for the Holy Grail.

-Joseph Pearce, Quest For Shakespeare

900 History

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

― Winston S. Churchill

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”

― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.”

― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

Why history? Why do some people love the past while others are enthralled with the future or can’t get enough of Tolkien’s Middle-earth? Why does science fiction hold so little interest for me, while historical fiction engages me? Who can say why people are drawn to machines, or medicine, or animals, or ideas? Rarely can we clearly identify the sources of our passions. It is actually easier to state why we dislike something. I suspect those who claim to dislike history have never truly encountered the past in a way that captivated their imagination. To me, history requires a great deal of imagination, and mine revs up when I start looking at primary source materials and begin asking questions. The study of history has often been compared with detective work. Both require the practitioner to make hypotheses and inferences, to think critically and to draw firm conclusions based on the evidence at hand. When the rote facts of history give way to multiple perspectives, conflicting opinions, and sometimes even mysteries, my mind is engaged and my curiosity piqued.

-Tim Grove, A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History

The best historians tell stories about the past—stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most stories end with a lesson or a “moral.” While a historian may not explicitly preach the moral of his or her story, if told in a compelling fashion, the moral will always be evident to the reader. We use narratives to make sense of our world. It is how we bring order to our own human experiences and the human experiences of others.

-John Fea, Why Study History? 

“The Art of Biography is different from Geography,” the humorist Edmund Bentley observed in 1905; “Biography is about chaps, but Geography is about maps.” For many years, chaps—in the British sense of upper-class men—dominated the stories historians told, to the point that history was barely distinguishable from biography. That changed in the twentieth century as historians made women, lower-class men, and children into honorary chaps too, adding their voices to the mix. Once we recognize that chaps (in large groups and in the newer, broader sense of the word) are all much the same, I will argue, all that is left is maps.

-Ian Morris, Why the West Rules--for Now 

 “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

― Mark Twain

Actual History: “I kept waiting for the book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.”

“Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.”

“Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.”

“In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.”

“The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.”

― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”

“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”

― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Historical Fiction: “They call this an orphan train, children, and you are lucky to be on it. You are leaving behind an evil place, full of ignorance, poverty, and vice, for the nobility of country life. While you are on this train you will follow some simple rules. You will be cooperative and listen to instructions. You will be obedient to your chaperones. You will treat the train car respectfully and will not damage it in any way. You will encourage your seatmates to behave appropriately. In short, you will make Mr. Curran and me proud of your behavior.” Her voice rises as we settle in our seats. “When you are allowed to step off the train, you will stay within the area we designate. You will not wander off alone at any time. And if your comportment proves to be a problem, if you cannot adhere to these simple rules of common decency, you will be sent straight back to where you came from and discharged on the street, left to fend for yourselves.”

― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train

Travel into History: “So,” he said.  “You went and you came back. What do you think?”

“Al, I don’t know what to think. I’m rocked right down to my foundations. You found this by accident?”

“Totally. Less than a month after I got myself set up here. I must have still had Pine Street dust on the heels of my shoes. The first time, I actually fell down these stairs, like Alice into the rabbit hole. I thought I’d gone insane.”

I could imagine. I’d had at least some preparation, poor though it had been. And really, was there any adequate way to prepare a person for a trip back in time?

“How long was I gone?”

“Two minutes. I told you, it’s always two minutes. No matter how long you stay.” He coughed, spat into a fresh wad of napkins, and folded them away in his pocket. “And when you go down the steps, it’s always 11:58 A.M. on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip. 

It was as if 1958 were still right here, only hidden beneath a flimsy film of intervening years.

Funny History: The leading contender in the first presidential election race was George Washington, who waged a campaign based on heavy exposure in media such as coins, stamps, and famous oil paintings. This shrewd strategy carried him to a landslide victory in which he carried every state except Massachusetts, which voted for George McGovern.

-Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here

Interesting and Strange Historical Trivia:

The newspapers of 1838 were full of murder, violence and mayhem. Surely, the Queen herself would be safe from the murderers, madmen and fanatics infesting London and its environs? But her court at Buckingham Palace was run by well-nigh medieval standards by a number of inert functionaries, and no person was directly responsible for her security. Three groups of equally ineffective royal guardians operated independent of each other: the elderly and feeble royal porters, the royal pages who valued their night’s sleep, and the military sentries who did not take their job very seriously. This very slack regime was exposed by Queen Victoria’s determined young stalker, the extraordinary ‘Boy Jones’, who developed an obsession with the young Queen. Time after time, he sneaked into Buckingham Palace to spy on her, sit on the throne, and rummage in her private apartments. ‘Supposing he had come into the Bedroom, how frightened I should have been!’ the fearful young Queen wrote in her Journal after the Boy Jones had been discovered lurking underneath a sofa in the room next to the one where she slept.

Charles Dickens, who once visited the Boy Jones in prison, knew his story well. It does not appear as if Dickens ever contemplated using it for the plot of one of his novels, perhaps because his enemy G. W. M. Reynolds beat him to it. This is a pity, since the Boy Jones himself comes across as a mix between Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge: a twisted innocent left to his own devices in a dangerous, hostile world full of perversion and intrigue.

-Jan Bondeson,   Queen Victoria & the Stalker: The Strange Story of the Boy Jones 

Taking a Whack at the Truth A lot of erroneous history is passed down in books, plays, movies, and poems—usually these were intended to be entertainment, not historical truths. But some of these false facts are so ingrained in our consciousness that there’s little chance of the truth becoming as popular as the fiction.

 Here’s an example: What do you think of when you hear the name Lizzie Borden? Everyone chant with me:

 “Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her mother forty whacks,

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one,”

Since she was first suspected of hacking her parents to death in 1892, Lizzie Borden has stood out as one of the few female homicidal maniacs in history—and if it wasn’t for this little refrain, her name would have been forgotten years ago.

What is forgotten is that a jury acquitted Lizzie Borden after only sixty-six minutes of deliberation and all charges were dropped. I hope the truth about Lizzie’s innocence becomes as popular as the song—and then we can all just bury the hatchet.

-Leland Gregory, Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Through the Ages

910 Travel & Geography 

“Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish."

"Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.”

― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

 “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”

― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

 “The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.”

― Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

“The places we visited were always richer and always more intricate than one could imagine. I loved to find out about the world, the good and the bad, in this way. For me, observing things with my own eyes was the only way. My wanderlust was also a wonderlust.”

― Luke F.D. Marsden, Wondering, the Way is Made: A South American Odyssey

“Apart from the peace and emptiness of the landscape, there is a special smell about winter in Provence which is accentuated by the wind and the clean, dry air. Walking in the hills, I was often able to smell a house before I could see it, because of the scent of woodsmoke coming from an invisible chimney. It is one of the most primitive smells in life, and consequently extinct in most cities, where fire regulations and interior decorators have combined to turn fireplaces into blocked-up holes or self-consciously lit "architectural features." The fireplace in Provence is still used - to cook on, to sit around, to warm the toes, and to please the eye - and fires are laid in the early morning and fed throughout the day with scrub oak from the Luberon or beech from the foothills of Mont Ventoux. Coming home with the dogs as dusk fell, I always stopped to look from the top of the valley at the long zigzag of smoke ribbons drifting up from the farms that are scattered along the Bonnieux road. It was a sight that made me think of warm kitchens and well-seasoned stews, and it never failed to make me ravenous.”

― Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence

910 Geography & travel

911 Historical geography

912 Graphic representations of surface of earth and of extraterrestrial worlds

913 Geography of & travel in ancient world

914 Geography of & travel in Europe

Ireland

915 Geography of & travel in Asia

916 Geography of & travel in Africa

917 Geography of & travel in North America

918 Geography of & travel in South America

919 Geography of & travel in Australasia, Pacific Ocean islands, Atlantic Ocean islands, Arctic islands, Antarctica, & on extraterrestrial worlds

920 Biography/ Memoir

“Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.”

― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.”

― Mae West

Biography: “According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing [of the Declaration of Independence], but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it.

Why?" Jefferson asked, as Adams would recount.

Reasons enough," Adams said.

What can be your reasons?"

Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.”

― David McCullough, John Adams

“Always live your life with your biography in mind.”

― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Autobiography: “What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is lead in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water-and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden-it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.”

― Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Diary: “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”

― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Journal:

“We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trod. The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. However, as the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the coloring to events, when the imagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life. (Meriwether Lewis)”

― John Bakeless, The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Letters:

Customer Service Dept.

GOOD COOK DINNER FORK CO.

BRADSHAW INTERNATIONAL, INC

9303 Greenleaf Ave Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670

Dear Customer Service Dept.,

I just want to tell you how happy I am with my fork. I use it all the time. In this world of people not giving others credit I just want to say that the Good Cook Dinner Fork company makes a very good fork. Maybe the best fork I have ever used! Certainly, better than my spoon.

 I use your fork on the following: mashed potatoes, melon chunks, cranberry roll, beets, corn, lettuce, cake. Please let me know that the people who made my fork were thanked. They deserve more than just looking at forks all day. Let them know others are out there and they care!!! Thank you.

I look forward to hearing from you soon. In the meantime I will continue to use my fork on the following: Sandwich meat, pie, pineapple, imitation crab, yams, rice, gumbo. Will you be coming out with any new fork designs soon? I like my fork, but I want to be up to date on the fork designs. Will there be more prongs? I am satisfied with the number of prongs I have now, but you never know.

Thanks for thanking the fork makers for me and writing me back and telling me they were thanked.

Thanks.

Best Wishes,

Ted L. Nancy

-Ted L Nancy, More Letters from a Nut 

My dear Wormwood,

 "To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.  

Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE

— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

Memoir: “When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

 . . . nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.”

― Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499)

940 History of Europe

950 History of Asia

970 History of North America

980 History of South America

990 History of other areas

990 History of Australasia, Pacific Ocean islands, Atlantic Ocean islands, Arctic islands, Antarctica, extraterrestrial worlds

991–992 Not assigned or no longer used

993 New Zealand

994 Australia

995 New Guinea & neighboring countries of Melanesia

996 Polynesia & other Pacific Ocean islands

997 Atlantic Ocean islands

998 Arctic islands & Antarctica

999 Extraterrestrial worlds

The entries associated with a specific number are listed in the general order in which they are arranged on the shelves.

200                       Religion (289.7 – Amish; 290 – Non-Christian Religions, Mythology, Cults)

300                       Social Sciences (301.451 – Ethnic Groups)

305 – 306            Social/Family Relationships, Divorce, Single-Parenting (306.88 – Grief & Dealing with Death)

310                       Statistics, Almanacs, Population

320                       Political Science (323.6 – U.S. Citizenship)

330                       Economics, Communism

331                       Jobs, Careers

332                       Finance, Investments, Mutual Funds

333                       Real Estate

336                       Taxes

340                       Law (346-347 – Divorce, Wills, Living Trusts, Power of Attorney, Bankruptcy, Probate)

350                       Government, Civil Service

355 – 359            Military, ASVAB

361                       Fundraising, Foundations, Grants

362                       AIDS, Suicide, Alcohol/Drug Abuse, Day Care, Adoption, Child/Spouse Abuse, Date Rape

363                       Environment, Recycling, Acid Rain

363.46   Abortion

364                       Crime, Assassinations, Murders, Death Penalty

368                       Insurance

370                       Education, Home Learning, Reading

373                       GED (also 300.76, 428.2, 500.76, 510.76, 700.76)

378                       Colleges, SAT, ACT, GRE, CLAST, Scholarships

380                       Transportation, Post Office Exams, Railroads, Lighthouses, Airlines

391                       Costume, Folk Dress, Fashion

394                       Anniversaries, Holidays, Christmas, Customs

395                       Etiquette/Manners, Weddings

398                       Folklore, Legends, Fairytales

400 – 429            Dictionaries, Grammar, ESL/TOEFL (419 – Sign Language)

430 – 499            Foreign Languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.)

500                       Natural Sciences

510                       Mathematics, Algebra, Decimals, Fractions, etc.

520                       Astronomy, Space, Planets, Constellations

530                       Physics, Sound, Light, Electricity, Magnetism

540                       Chemistry

550                       Earth Sciences, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Oceans, Weather, Rocks & Minerals

560                       Fossils, Dinosaurs

570                       Biology, Evolution (574.5 – Rain Forests)

580                       Botany, Herbs, Trees, Plants

590                       Animals (595.7 – Insects; 597.9 – Reptiles; 598 – Birds; 599 – Mammals)

600 – 609            Technology, Inventions, Patents (604 – Blueprints)

610                       Medicine (610.73 – Nurses)

612.6     Pregnancy/Child Birth

613                       Health, Nutrition, Fitness

615                       Prescription Drugs, Natural Healing, Acupuncture

616                       Diseases (.1 – Heart; .85 – Anorexia, Depression; .89 – Mental Disorders, Alzheimer’s; .9 – AIDS, Cancer)

617                       Miscellaneous Medical (.56 – Back; .58 – Feet; .6 – Dentistry; .7 – Vision; .8 – Hearing)

618                       Gynecology, Pregnancy/Child Birth, Children’s Health

620                       Engineering (621.3 – Electricity, Electronics, Computer & VCR Maintenance/Repair)

621.4     Lawnmowers, Internal Combustion Engines (623.8 – Outboard Motors)

629.1     Paper Airplanes, Pilots, Air Traffic Controllers

629.2     Automobile Repair (Chilton’s)

635                       Gardening, Hydroponics, Roses, Orchids, Citrus

636                       Pets:  Horses, Birds, Dogs, Cats, Fish (639 – Earthworms)

640                       Family Budgets, Clutter, Time Management

641.5     Cooking (.563 – Special Diets; .59 – Regional; .6 – Specific Ingredients, e.g., Fish)

642                       Entertaining, Catering, Napkin Folding

643                       House Buying, Remodeling, Home Repair

646                       Sewing, Clothes, Draperies, Hair Cutting, Cosmetics

647                       Apartment Management, Hotels/Motels, Bed & Breakfasts, Restaurants

648                       Cleaning, Stain Removal, Insect Pests

649                       Child Development, Baby Care, Discipline

650                       Business, MBA Schools (650.14 – Resumes, Cover Letters, Job Hunting, Interviews)

651                       Business Communication, Secretaries, Business Letters

652                       Typing, Word Processing (653 – Shorthand)

657                       CPA, Accounting, Bookkeeping, Financial Reports

658                       Starting a Business, Entrepreneurs, Financing, Management, Interviewing

658.8     Marketing, Sales, Franchising

659                       Advertising, Fashion Modeling

683                       Clocks, Guns, Appliance Repair

684                       Woodworking, Furniture Making, Upholstery

690                       Construction, Home Building, Swimming Pools, Carpentry, Plumbing, Air Conditioning

700                       Arts (709 – Art History)

710                       Landscaping

720                       Architecture (728 – House Plans)

730                       Sculpture (736.9 – Origami; 737.4 – Coin Collecting)

741.5     Cartoons (743 – Drawing; 745.1 – Antiques, Collectibles)

745.5     Crafts, Paper Airplanes, Balloons, Toys, Dolls (745.594 – Christmas Crafts, Wreaths)

745.6     Calligraphy (745.9 – Flower Arranging, Potpourri)

746                       Needlework:  Macrame, Knitting, Needlepoint, Cross Stitch, Quilts

747                       Decorating, Interior Design

748                       Depression Glass, Stained Glass, Bottles

749                       Furniture (History, Antique)

751                       Painting Techniques (e.g., Watercolors)

759                       Painting Styles, Artists (by Country, Period – e.g., French Renaissance)

769                       Baseball Cards, Stamp Collecting

770                       Photography

780                       Music (780.92 & 784.092 – Musicians, Biographies; 787 – Musical Instruments)

791 – 792            Acting, Clowning (791.43 – Actors & Actresses, Movies; 791.45 – Television Shows)

792.8     Ballet

793                       Parties, Showers, Balloon Sculpture, Party Games, Dancing (Ballroom, Folk, etc.),

                                             Role-playing Games (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons), Magic

794                       Indoor Games, Chess, Billiards, Computer Games (e.g., Nintendo), Gambling, Cards

796                       Sports (.32 – Basketball; .33 – Football; .34 – Tennis; .352 – Golf;

                                             .357 – Baseball; .41 – Weight Lifting; .42 – Track & Field, Olympics)

796.5     Camping, Hiking

796.7     Motor Racing (cars, motorcycles, motocross)

796.8     Martial Arts, Boxing, Wrestling, Judo, Karate, etc.

797                       Boating, Canoeing, Swimming (797.5 – Air Sports, Flying, Ballooning, Skydiving)

798                       Horsemanship, Racing, Betting (799 – Fishing, Hunting)

800                       Literature

808                       Writing, Getting Published, Style Manuals, Public Speaking (808.8 – Quotations)

810                       American Literature (811 – Poetry, Haiku; 812 – Drama, Plays; 813 – Literary Criticisms)

814, 817, 818     Essays, Humor, Jokes (e.g., Robert Fulghum, Dave Barry, Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard)

820                       English Poetry, Drama, etc. (822.3 – Shakespeare)

830 – 899            Other Literatures (by region)

900                       Geography, History (909 – World History)

910                       Geography & Travel

912                       Atlases, Maps

913 – 919            Travel & Description (913 – Ancient Civilizations, Egypt, Rome, Greece, etc.; 914 – Europe; 915 – Asia;

                                             916 – Africa; 917.1 – Canada; 917.2 – Mexico, Caribbean; 917.3 – USA; 917.59 – Florida;

                                             918 – South America; 919 – Pacific, Australia, Hawaii)

920                       Collective Biographies (923.173 – U.S. Presidents)

929                       Genealogy, Family Trees (929.4 – Baby Names; 929.9 – Flags)

930 – 999            History (by location, similar to 913 – 919, e.g., 975.9 – Florida)

                                             (940.1 – Middle Ages; 940.5 – World War II; 941 – British Royalty; 956 – Middle East;

                                             959 – Vietnam War; 970 – American Indian Tribes; 973.7 – U.S. Civil War)

•               1 • MS. Found in a Bottle • [Tales of the Folio Club] • (1833) • short story by Edgar Allan Poe

•             51 • A Tale of Three Lions • non-genre • [Allan Quatermain • 4] • (1887) • novelette by H. Rider Haggard

•             78 • The Isle of Voices • (1893) • novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson

•             108 • The Red Stockade • non-genre • (1894) • short story by Bram Stoker

•             123 • The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes • (1885) • novelette by Rudyard Kipling

•             143 • Aepyornis Island • (1894) • short story by H. G. Wells (variant of

Æpyornis Island?Aepyornis Island

) MS found in a bottle / Edgar Allan Poe -- A hazard of the north / Gilbert Parker -- The private history of a campaign that failed / Mark Twain -- A tale of three lions / H. Rider Haggard -- The isle of voices / Robert Louis Stevenson -- The man-eater of the Terai / G.A. Henty -- The red stockade / Bram Stoker -- The strange ride of Morrowbie Jukes / Rudyard Kipling -- Aepyornis Island / H.G. Wells -- The lagoon / Joseph Conrad -- All gold canyon / Jack London -- The grove of Ashtaroth / John Buchan -- The fiend of the cooperage / Arthur Conan Doyle -- The follower / Frederick Carruthers Cornell -- Tigre / Zane Grey -- Hatteras / A.E.W. Mason -- Thunder over Germany: a 'Biggles' adventure / Captain W.E. Johns -- Truth is stranger / Percival Christopher wre???Wren -- A distant episode / Paul Bowles -- The chamois / Daphne Du Maurier -- Octopussy / Ian Fleming -- On the rainy river / Tim O'Brien -- Death by landscape / Margaret Atwood

•             186 • The Grove of Ashtaroth • (1910) • novelette by John Buchan

•             208 • The Fiend of the Cooperage • (1897) • short story by Arthur Conan Doyle

•             220 • The Follower • (1915) • short story by Fred C. Cornell [as by Frederick Carruthers Cornell]

•             242 • Hatteras • (1901) • novelette by A. E. W. Mason

•             301 • A Distant Episode • non-genre • (1947) • short story by Paul Bowles

•             385 • Death by Landscape • (1989) • short story by Margaret Atwood

•             1 • Voice of the Hurricane • short story by Paul M. Berger [as by Paul Berger]

•             17 • The Last of the Zeppelins • novelette by Jed Hartman

•             43 • The Eckener Alternative • short story by James L. Cambias

•             53 • Instead of a Loving Heart • short story by Jeremiah Tolbert

•             65 • This Is the Highest Step in the World • short story by Carrie Vaughn

•             73 • The Sky's the Limit • short story by Lawrence M. Schoen

•             93 • A Perilous Warm Embrace • short story by Michael Manis

•             103 • Sky Light • novelette by David Brin

•             149 • Negation Elimination • short story by Robert Burke Richardson

•             165 • Why a Duck • short story by Leslie What

•             179 • Matriarch • short story by Forrest Aguirre

•             181 • Aerophilia • short story by Tobias S. Buckell

•             199 • The Jewels of Lemuria • novelette by Richard A. Lupoff

•             229 • Counting Zeppelins • short story by Eric T. Marin [as by Eric Marin]

•             231 • Love in the Balance • short story by David D. Levine

•             247 • Where and When • short story by James Van Pelt

•             271 • Seven Dragons Mountains • short story by Elizabeth Bear

•             287 • Silk • short story by Lee Battersby

•             299 • Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum • novelette by Benjamin Rosenbaum

•             327 • You *Could* Go Home Again • (1993) • novella by Howard Waldrop

•             Adventure StoriesPublication Record # 643364

•             Editor: Clive King

•             6 • Introduction (Great Tales of Action and Adventure) • (1958) • essay by George Bennett

•             7 • The Bamboo Trap • short fiction by Robert S. Lemmon https://archive.org/details/greattalesofacti00benn

•             23 • Leiningen Versus the Ants • (1938) • novelette by Carl Stephenson (trans. of Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen 1937)

•             49 • The Blue Cross • non-genre • [Father Brown] • (1910) • novelette by G. K. Chesterton

•             71 • The Most Dangerous Game • non-genre • (1924) • novelette by Richard Edward Connell [as by Richard Connell]

•             95 • The Fourth Man • (1917) • short story by John Russell

•             117 • The Interlopers • (1912) • short story by Saki

•             124 • The Adventure of the Dancing Men • non-genre • [Sherlock Holmes] • (1903) • novelette by Arthur Conan Doyle

•             153 • The Pit and the Pendulum • (1842) • short story by Edgar Allan Poe

•             171 • Rescue Party • (1946) • novelette by Arthur C. Clarke

•             203 • August Heat • (1910) • short story by William Fryer Harvey [as by W. F. Harvey]

•             209 • To Build a Fire • non-genre • (1908) • short story by Jack London

•             228 • Action • short fiction by C. E. Montague

•            

•             xv • Introduction (The Big Book of Adventure Stories) • essay by Otto Penzler

•            

•             4 • The Golden Snare • [Lady Fulvia] • (1918) • short story by Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur

•            

•            

•             16 • The Devil in Iron • [Conan] • (1934) • novelette by Robert E. Howard

•            

•             35 • The Mighty Manslayer • non-genre • [Khlit the Cossack] • (1918) • novelette by Harold Lamb

•            

•             74 • The Seven Black Priests • [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] • (1953) • novelette by Fritz Leiber

•             Master magician / Loring Brent

•             127 • The Most Dangerous Game • non-genre • (1924) • novelette by Richard Edward Connell [as by Richard Connell]

•             Man who wold be king / Rudyard Kipling

•             159 • The Wings of Kali • [The Spider] • (1942) • short story by Norvell W. Page [as by Grant Stockbridge]

•             White silence / Jack London

•             175 • Sredni Vashtar • (1910) • short story by Saki

•            

•             179 • The Seed from the Sepulcher • (1933) • short story by Clark Ashton Smith

•            

•             187 • Leiningen Versus the Ants • (1938) • novelette by Carl Stephenson (trans. of Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen 1937)

 -- Hell Cay / Lester Dent

-- Off the Mangrove Coast / Louis L' Amour

 -- Golden Anaconda / Elmer Brown Mason

-- Shanghai Jim / Frank L. Packard

-- Python pit / George F. Worts

 --Soul of a turk / Achmed Abdullah

-- Peace waits at Marokee / H. Bedford-Jones

•            

•             201 • The Sea Raiders • (1896) • short story by H. G. Wells (variant of The Sea-Raiders)

•            

•             349 • Nor Idolatry Blind the Eye • [Gabriel Hunt] • (2009) • novelette by Charles Ardai [as by Gabriel Hunt]

 -- Soul of a regiment / Talbot Mundy

•            

•             381 • Snake-Head • (1939) • novelette by Theodore Roscoe

 -- Suicide Patrol / Georges Surdez

-- Gentleman of color / P. C. Wren

•            

•             446 • After King Kong Fell • [Wold Newton] • (1973) • short story by Philip José Farmer

 -- Moonlight sonata / Alexander Woollcott –

 Caballero's way / O. Henry –

Zorro deals with treason / Johnston McCulley –

Hopalong's hop / Clarence E. Mulford –

•            

•             498 • The Girl in the Golden Atom • [Matter] • (1919) • novella by Ray Cummings

•            

•             529 • To Serve Man • (1950) • short story by Damon Knight

•            

•            

•             537 • Armageddon—2419 A. D. • [Buck Rogers • 1] • (1928) • novella by Philip Francis Nowlan

Woman in love / Geoffrey Household –

MacHinery and the Cauliflowers / Alistair MacLean –

 Wheels within wheels / H.C. McNeile –

Question of passports / Baroness Orczy –

•             Intelligence / Rafael Sabatini

•             626 • The Copper Bowl • (1928) • short story by George Fielding Eliot

•            

•             634 • The Hand of the Mandarin Quong • (1922) • short story by Sax Rohmer (variant of The Mystery of the Shriveled Hand)

•             Green wildebeest / John Buchan

•             660 • The Slave Brand of Sleman bin Ali • [Sheena] • (1951) • novelette by James Anson Buck

•             Fire / L. Patrick Greene –

•             705 • Hunter Quatermain's Story • [Allan Quatermain • 6] • (1885) • novelette by H. Rider Haggard

 Bosambo of Monrovia / Edgar Wallace –

 Black cargo / Cornell Woolrich –

•            

•             742 • Tarzan the Terrible • [Tarzan • 8] • (1921) • novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs

•             High Adventure once was a popular genre with many pulp magazines providing markets for writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alistair MacLean, and Talbot Mundy. Sadly, those magazines are gone. But thanks to Otto Penzler, we have an 874-page tome of adventure stories to delight us. Penzler takes a thematic approach by group stories in groups like “Sand and Sun” and “Island Paradise.” If you’re a fan of adventure stories, you’ll enjoy this massive collection.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

•             SWORD AND SORCERY

The Golden Snare Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur

The Devil in Iron Robert E. Howard

The Mighty Manslayer Harold Lamb

The Seven Black Priests Fritz Leiber

•            

•             MEGALOMANIA RULES

The Master Magician Loring Brent

The Most Dangerous Game Richard Connell

The Man Who Would be King Rudyard Kipling

The Wings of Kali Grant Stockbridge

•            

•             MAN VS. NATURE

The White Silence Jack London

Sredni Vashtar Saki

The Seed from the Sepulcher Clark Ashton Smith

Leiningen versus the Ants Carl Stephenson

The Sea Raiders H. G. Wells

•            

•             ISLAND PARADISE

Hell Cay Lester Dent

Off the Mangrove Coast Louis L’Amour

The Golden Anaconda Elmer Brown Mason

Shanghai Jim Frank L. Packard

The Python Pit George F. Worts

•            

•             SAND AND SUN

The Soul of a Turk Achmed Abdullah

Peace Waits at Marokee H. Bedford-Jones

Nor Idolatry Blind the Eye Gabriel Hunt

The Soul of a Regiment Talbot Mundy

Snake-Head Theodore Roscoe

Suicide Patrol Georges Surdez

A Gentleman of Color P. C. Wren

•            

•             SOMETHING FEELS FUNNY

After King Kong Fell Philip Jose Farmer

Moonlight Sonata Alexander Woollcott

•            

•             GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

The Caballero’s Way O. Henry

Zorro Deals with Treason Johnston McCulley

Hopalong’s Hop Clarence E. Mulford

•             FUTURE SHOCK

The Girl in the Golden Atom Ray Cummings

To Serve Man Damon Knight

Armageddon—2419 A. D. Philip Francis Nowlan

•             I SPY

Woman in Love Geoffrey Household

MacHinery and the Cauliflowers Alistair MacLean

Wheels Within Wheels H. C. McNeile

A Question of Passports Baroness Orczy

Intelligence Rafael Sabatini

•             YELLOW PERIL

The Copper Bowl George Fielding Eliot

The Hand of the Mandarin Quong Sax Rohmer

•             IN DARKEST AFRICA

The Green Wildebeest John Buchan

The Slave Brand of Slegman Bin Ali James Anson Buck

Fire L. Patrick Greene

Hunter Quatermain’s Story H. Rider Haggard

Bosambo of Monrovia Edgar Wallace

Black Cargo Cornell Woolrich

Tarzan the Terrible Edgar Rice Burroughs

You must flee again / Paul Spencer -- The kit-bag / Algernon Blackwood -- The facts in the case of M. Valdemar / Edgar Allen Poe -- Smee / A.M. Burrage -- The Bishop's ghost and the printer's baby / Frank R. Stockton -- John Bartine'w Watch / Ambrose Bierce -- The open window / Saki (H.H.Munroe) -- LeVert Galant / Anonymous -- On the river / Guy de Maupassant -- The considerate hosts / Thorp McClusky -- To be taken with a grain of salt / Charles Dickens -- Across the moors / William Fryer Harvey -- The hall bedroom / Mary E. Wilkins -- Faces / Arthur F. Burks.

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Items  only show available

Library

Call No.

 

Status

Econnect

BELMONT/Adult

SC PEN

DAMAGED

LEXINGTON/Adult

FICTION BIG

AVAILABLE

NEWTON/Adult

Short Stories B48PE

Out

Details

Publication Info

New York : Vintage Books, 2011.

Description

p. cm.

ISBN

9780307474506

030747450X

Contents

Golden snare / Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur -- Devil in Iron / Robert E. Howard -- Mighty manslayer / Harold Lamb -- Seven black priests / Fritz Leiber -- Master magician / Loring Brent -- Most dangerous game / Richard Connell -- Man who wold be king / Rudyard Kipling -- Wings of Kali / Grant Stockbridge -- White silence / Jack London -- Sredni Vashtar / Saki -- Seed from the sepulcher / Clark Ashton Smith -- Leiningen versus the ants / Carl Stephenson -- Sea Raiders / H.G. Wells -- Hell Cay / Lester Dent -- Off the Mangrove Coast / Louis L' Amour -- Golden Anaconda / Elmer Brown Mason -- Shanghai Jim / Frank L. Packard -- Python pit / George F. Worts --Soul of a turk / Achmed Abdullah -- Peace waits at Marokee / H. Bedford-Jones -- Nor idolatry blind the eye / Gabriel Hunt -- Soul of a regiment / Talbot Mundy -- Snake-head / Theodore Roscoe -- Suicide Patrol / Georges Surdez -- Gentleman of color / P. C. Wren -- After King Kong fell / Philip Jose Farmer -- Moonlight sonata / Alexander Woollcott -- Caballero's way / O. Henry -- Zorro deals with treason / Johnston McCulley -- Hopalong's hop / Clarence E. Mulford -- Girl in the golden atom / Ray Cummings -- To serve man / Damon Knight -- Armageddon - 2419 A.D. / Philip Francis Nowlan -- Woman in love / Geoffrey Household -- MacHinery and the Cauliflowers / Alistair MacLean -- Wheels within wheels / H.C. McNeile -- Question of passports / Baroness Orczy -- Intelligence / Rafael Sabatini -- Copper bowl / George Fielding Eliot -- Hand of the Mandarin Quong / Sax Rohmer -- Green wildebeest / John Buchan -- Slave brand of Slegman Bin Ali / James Anson Buck -- Fire / L. Patrick Greene -- Hunter Quatermain's Story / H. Rider Haggard -- Bosambo of Monrovia / Edgar Wallace -- Black cargo / Cornell Woolrich -- Tarzan the terrible / Edgar Rice Burroughs.