Zack

“Having given him the habit of arguing straight and not being taken in by idle words, he had neglected to tell him that in someone who is not highly regarded, this habit is a crime; for all sound arguments cause offense.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“He had twice fallen, in sheer abstraction, from his horse.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“People—adults as well as children—so often just don’t realize what they’re looking at. There’s no thought behind it. They’ll say to themselves, ‘Well, that’s a bookshelf’ or ‘That’s an elephant,’ and see nothing other than just the fact. There’s no sense of relationship—or the relationship of a house to its environment, a man to his environment, of the scale of things. … Seeing is really a decision-making process, a matter of evaluating what is around you”
― Robert McCloskey

“I desire to so conduct the affairs of this Administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be deep down inside of me.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian