Fletcher Chapin

“No, she simply felt - at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinctive intuitive moments - as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“Darwin did not change the islands, but only people’s opinion of them. That was how important mere opinions used to be back in the era of great big brains.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Galápagos

“In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Player Piano

“We write books because our children aren’t interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting