Josh

“It is only through the possession of an ever-illuminating library that we can come to recognize and understand the horror and wonder of the human family's Odyssey and its quest for wholeness, freedom, salvation, love, and dominion over fire, flood, suffering, and every disease and death—from the river Styx to space. Without reading as an essential resource for survival in our everyday experience, the individual . . . swings in the orchard of time, an empty-headed scarecrow—gleeful in his wilderness.”
― Leon Forrest, Relocations of the Spirit: Collected Essays

“One is wise only as much as the wisdom of one's books, and therefore one should sell all he has and buy books.”
― Isaac Canpanton

“Big Brother is not watching you; Big Brother is you, watching.”
― Stanley Rothman, The End of the Experiment: The Rise of Cultural Elites and the Decline of America's Civic Culture

“I was lucky. I got away with it.” He meant that his bad start, his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had somehow combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful . . . the part that did not get away with it—the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.”
― Saul Bellow, The Victim