Dave Russell

“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

“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

“People avenge themselves for the favors done them.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia