Juliana

“Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren

“Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist.”
― Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.”
― V.S. Naipaul