Dave Russell

“And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision. ”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“No sooner had the town dropped back than all sort of stuff and nonsense, as is usual with us, began scrawling itself along both sides of the road: tussocks, fir trees, low skimpy stands of young pines, charred trunks of old ones, wild heather, and similar gibberish.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up