Jerry Sandeen

“Which is the greater sin? To care too much? Or too little?”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I'll bet that if he had used the phrases: "Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward—or rather laterally—in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet," and "Now, returning—or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit"—I'll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination.”
― O. Henry, Sixes and Sevens

“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“It came from a piece of old wood that he found in the yard somewhere. That's what we all are, Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood, until we--each one of us, individually--decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better. Because we need you to be and want you to be." --Grant”
― Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying