Given these outstanding accomplishments, much now depends on the level of performance of the Grim Reaper. Can he be counted on to do the job? Mortuary management was gloomy on this score, noting that due to medical advances in the treatment of cancer and heart disease, the death rate was bound to decline. Not so the brokerage houses and investment analysts. The Goldman Sachs brokerage house, analyzing their prospects, predicts a rosy future: "Aggregate deaths have increased at roughly 1.1 percent on a compound basis since 1940. . . . Going forward, the continued aging of the baby-boomers, coupled with an increasing proportion of people over age 65, should keep aggregate deaths rising. . . . The aging of America should enable the death care industry to experience extremely stable demand in the future."

—Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death

There is no doubt that her family sufferings were groundless, had negligible cause, and were ridiculously exaggerated; but if you have a wart on your nose or forehead, it seems to you that all anyone in the world does and has ever done is to look at your wart, laugh at it, and denounce you for it, though for all that you may have discovered America.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Near the hospital there was a city park, a long green field with a statue at one end that looked new and not very important.

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

"Bob is hard to kill. He won't stay shot."

—Charles Portis, True Grit

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History

There's a period going past at the moment that may make us look as though we're in fashion.

—David Sylvian, interview, 1981

Their faces were less than six inches apart, but moved no closer. He understood, and she understood; she knew he understood, he knew she understood. He knew she knew he understood, and she knew he knew she knew he understood. They understood each other, perfectly.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

"You see," he said, "the idea of making things that don't spoil is to make them dead to start with, so they don't need to ever die. there's dead metal, that's angel silver, that won't rust or pit or tarnish; and dead cloths like this; and plastics like dead wood that won't dry-rot or get wormy or split. And strangest of all; the angels could make dead food. Food that never gets stale, never rots, never spoils. I eat it."

"I have food like that. I smoke it."

"No, no! Not that evil pink stuff! I mean food, food you eat. Look here." He stood on tiptoe and took down from a high shelf a closed pot of metal, with a dull plastic glow about it. "Metal," he said, "that won't rust, and a jacket of plastic over that. Now watch and listen." There was a ring attached to the top, and Teeplee worked his finger under it and pulled. I expected the ring to come off, but instead there was a hiss like an indrawn breath and the whole top came off in a graceful spiral. "Look," he said, and showed me what was inside: it looked like sawdust, or small chips of wood. "Potato," he said. "Not now, I mean, not just yet; but mix this with water, and you'd be surprised: a mashed-up potato is just what it is, and as good as new."

"As good as new? What does it taste like?"

"Well. Dead. But like food. Throw it in water and you've got something like a mashed-up potato that the angels made, boy, a potato that's a thousand years old." He looked reverently within the pot and shook the stuff; it made a dry, sandy sound. Now even a rock, he said, even a mountain changes in a thousand years. But the angels could make this potato that's dead to begin with, so it couldn't change. They could make a potato that's immortal."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

I crept up slowly to him and sat by him without speaking. He didn't look up at me, but now I saw that it wasn't sorrow that made him look down, but something in the grass at his feet which he watched intently: a black ant of the largest kind. It struggled through the bending grasses, its feelers waving unceasingly.

"Lost," Blink said. "Can't find his nest, lost the path. Nothing worse than that can happen to an ant. For an ant, being lost is a tragedy."

"What is that? Tragedy."

"Tragedy, it's an ancient word; it meant a description of a terrible thing that had happened to someone: something that, given circumstances and some fault in you, could happen to you, or to anybody. If this ant ever finds his nest again, and could tell about his experience and the suffering he felt, they'd have a tragedy. But he's unable, even if he does get back. In a way, no ant has ever before been in the tragedy of being lost; this one's the first, because ants have no way of telling about such things, and so being forewarned."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of the sailors tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical clock is more pervasive and strict: it presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest. When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

It is possible to conceive of men arrived at a degree of freedom that should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete equality of position, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of God, will forever escape the laws of man. However democratic, then, the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of a community will always find out several points about him which overlook his own position; and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. when inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.

 —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

All who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations ought frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient literature; there is no more wholesome medicine for the mind. Not that I hold the literary productions of the ancients to be irreproachable, but I think they have some special merits, admirably calculated to counterbalance our peculiar defects. They are a prop on the side on which we are in most danger of falling.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The Americans have traced out the circuit of an immense city on the site which they intend to make their capital, but which up to the present time is hardly more densely peopled than Pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a million inhabitants. They have already rooted up trees for ten miles around lest they should interfere with the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have erected a magnificent palace for Congress in the center of the city and have given it the pompous name of the Capitol.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a solid bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet."

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, and end which it was already but too easy to arrive at. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Who is the wise man who will be ready to hang himself because he does not know how to see God face to face, and because his reason cannot unravel the mystery of the Trinity? One might as well despair over not having four feet and two wings. Why make us hate our nature? Our existence is not so unhappy as they try to make us think. To look upon the universe as a dungeon, and all mankind as criminals who are goin g to be executed, is the idea of a fanatic. To believe that the world is a place of delight, where one should experience nothing but pleasure, is the dream of a Sybarite. To think that the earth, men, and animals are what they must be, according to the law of providence, is, I believe, the part of a wise man.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

[Shakespeare] was a fecund genius, full of vigor, ranging from simple naturalness to the sublime, without the least glimmer of taste or the slightest knowledge of the rules. I am going to tell you something rash, but true: the greatness of Shakespeare has been the ruin of the English stage. There are such beautiful scenes, such grand and terrible passages scattered throughout those monstrous farces of his called tragedies, that these plays have always been put on with great success. Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, in the end makes their faults respectable.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

"But is it not the deepest Law of nature that she remain constant?" cries an illuminated class: "Is not the machine of the universe fixed to move by unalterable rules?" Probable enough, good friends; nay, I too must believe that the God, whom ancient, inspired men assert to be "without variableness or shadow of turning," does indeed never change; that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be prevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable rules. And now of you too I make the old inquiry: What those same unalterable rules, forming the complete Status-Book of Nature, may possibly be?

They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in the accumulated records of man's Experience?—Was man with his Experience present at the Creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundation of the Universe, and gauged every thing there? Did the Maker take them into his counsel; that they read His ground-plan of the incomprehensible All; and can say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise! These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.

—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus