Jessabean

“You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life. But I tell you one thing.” “What’s that?” “It sure makes you appreciate something like this when you know it could all go up in a puff of smoke.”           HOWE”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“The shadow and flutter of Constant’s helicopter settling to the heliport seemed to many of the people below to be like the shadow and flutter of the Bright Angel of Death. It seemed that way because of the stock-market crash, because money and jobs were so scarce— And it seemed especially that way to them because the things that had crashed the hardest, that had pulled everything down with them, were the enterprises of Malachi Constant.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The hypercritical mother produced a son who was overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval. One suspects that, in dealing with this querulous woman, George became an overly controlled personality and learned to master his temper and curb his tongue. It was the extreme self-control of a deeply emotional young man who feared the fatal vehemence of his own feelings, if left unchecked.”
― Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life

“Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition