Phil

“Country cooking . . . You hear a lot about it back East. It’s one of those things that people revere even when they’ve never had any firsthand experience with it. Like justice and Jesus.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“Mungo stood on the threshold to Mrs McConnachie’s living room. He hadn’t been invited inside yet. The settee had six of the boys from the builder’s yard crammed on to it. They were packed thigh to thigh and spilled over the arms of the small sofa. In their nylon tracksuits they looked like so many plastic bags all stuffed together; a flammable, noisy jumble of colour-blocking and sponsorship logos. There was the manic throb of techno coming from the stereo; someone had a bootlegged copy of a Carl Cox set from Rezerection. It sounded like the DJ was pressing an early warning siren over a stuttering breakbeat. It was so aggressive sounding – it moved so fast – that it made Mungo feel tense.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And”
― James McBride, Deacon King Kong