Nicholas Fillmore

“That Christ was lucky or unlucky, that he was saved or used, seemed rather serious points of difference—even in the hurried-up atmosphere of the parish-house vestibule, drafty from the opening and closing of the outside door and at the same time smelling of steam from the wet woolen clothes that dripped melting snow into the heat registers.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself—this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was “interesting”
― Richard Yates, Disturbing the Peace: A Novel

“I would not go so far as to say that he was a good person … but Boris had his own set of rules and he stuck to them. Unlike everyone else I had met here, he managed to float above his circumstances … It was as if he had imagined every possibility in advance, and therefore he was never surprised by what happened. Inherent in his attitude was a pessimism so deep, so devastating, so fully in tune with the facts, that it actually made him cheerful.”
― Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

“Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange