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Italo Calvino
“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

James Fenimore Cooper
“has dropped into the river," said Hurry, after looking carefully along”
James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer

Philip Gourevitch
“The dead at Nyarubuye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there - these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn't settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful.”
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Pernell Plath Meier
“She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for so long that it was hard for her to take it off.”
Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

D.S.   Smith
“The mind is an incredibly complex machine, Stuart. Nobody fully understands the workings of it. Everyone has their own perception of the lives they lead and the environment in which they live them. For most of us, the perceptions are complimentary, so we accept reality as a collective experience. For instance, who is to say you see the colour of this t-shirt in the same way I do. We both perceive it as green, but whether or not we see the same colour, we can’t say. It doesn’t matter though as long as we all agree. Nevertheless, if a person comes in and says my t-shirt is red and everyone else says it is green then we have to question his or her perception of my t-shirt. There has to be a reason why their perception is different to ours. Of course, in that case, we would suspect colour blindness, a condition in which the receptors in the eye send erroneous signals to the brain. For whatever reason, Stuart, we are all seeing green, but you see red. We need to find out what is causing your brain to do that.”
D.S. Smith, Unparalleled

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