Essie Levoy

“And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting, we say, is long. We might just as well—or more accurately—say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system. We might almost go so far as to say that, as undigested food makes man no stronger, so time spent in waiting makes him no older. But in practice, of course, there is hardly such a thing as pure and unadulterated waiting.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“The risk her stories posed to others—and to herself—was more subtle. When she was younger, she had used secrets as if they were currency, but she’d found out how secrets could use her instead by becoming stronger than she. It happened whenever she couldn’t stay away from a secret—drawn to it the way Georg Weiler was drawn to the bottle—though she sensed it would be better for her not to know.”
― Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River

“They were going to look at war, the red
animal--war, the blood-swollen god.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

“Much of [John Hanning] Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa's "primitive races," in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham's son, Canaan, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations--most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah's curse justified slavery, and to Spake and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa's peoples. On "contemplating these sons of Noah," he marveled that "as they were then, so they appear to be now.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families