journalists-from-massachusetts

"For all practical purposes, wheat is civilization. It produces what we euphemistically call the staff of life, a staff which has recently been behaving like a boomerang...By the same token, wheat makes politics and has always made them. Whether you turn to ancient Rome, Egypt or Mesopotamia, or advert to modern times, you will find wheat working political earthquakes. Wheat, needed by England, won the Civil War for the North; then the American transcontinental lines opened the wheat empire of North America, and our wheat wrecked agriculture in Central Europe. Austria-Hungary took to growing hogs, instead, and agricultural experts swiftly decided that Serbian swine were unsanitary, laid down an embargo and started a political avalanche that led straight to Serajevo."

"The library is in a noble hall, and looks splendidly with its vista of alcoves. The most remarkable sight, however, was Mr. Hildreth, writing his history of the United States; he sits at a table, at the entrance of one of the alcoves, with his books and papers before him; as quiet and absorbed as he could be in the loneliest study; now consulting an authority, now penning a sentence or a paragraph, without seeming conscious of anything but his subject. It is very curious, thus to have a glimpse of a book in process of creation under one's eye. I know not how many hours he sits there; but while I saw him, he was a pattern of diligence and unwandering thought; he had taken himself out of this age, and put himself, I suppose, into that which he was writing about."

"Unfortunately, there have been, and are, in the world, very few governments in which the right of passive or unarmed resistance is acknowledged. By most governments, such resistance is considered and treated as no better than open rebellion, which thus becomes the sole resource of oppressed subjects."

"Religious art Is the blossom of religious dogma, and is its pictorial exponent. It is no more possible to have a religious art without dogmas, than to have a religious worship without faith. From this faith In a revealed dogma, will spring, with more or less perfection and vigor, every work bearing. In the most remote manner, upon religious events and emotions; and, not from the bare belief, but from the glowing, sanctified inspiration of devout affection, holy desire and adoring faith, have sprung. In every age, those conceptions of heavenly things that appeal to the sympathies of modern as well as of ancient Christendom."

"The public school is the one force, is the only force, that can unify all classes and conditions of society. Here we have the children of the nation in their entirety, and we can, if we will, teach them in the schools so much of the grandeur of our possessions, of the heroic in our history, of the brilliant in our prosperity, of the fascinating in our traditions, that the fathers of the future will be willing to vote for, and die, if need be, for, the American idea; that the mothers of the future will teach their sons to develop our resources by industry, to honor the historic heroism of our sires, to project the brilliancy of our prosperity into the future, to cherish, with unwavering devotion, the traditions of the land."

"In that time he has done as much as, and probably more than any other person, to explain Australia to his fellow countrymen. In addition he has played an important part in explaining Australia to itself."

"He loved talking: he loved to be a Dr Johnson in the New World."

"The Australian–American policy must be flung into the ring where the Continental Americans and the Imperial Americans do battle."

"[C]ulturally there is a vast amount of hard work to be done before the average Australian has ordinary tolerance and understanding of American life and thought."

"Australia to the world lay hid in night: God said, "Let Grattan be!" and all was light."

"But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead God, why would they?"

"Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause."

"“And I think I’ve figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything.” “Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve almost always been wrong.”"

"You want to know what it’s like to be a demon? Imagine knowing, always and forever, that you are right, and that everyone and everything else is wrong."

"He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do."

"Janet stopped at the very end of the pier and looked around, hands on hips. Everything looked normal. Not a lot of apocalypse going on here. But then swamps already looked like the end of the world anyway. Maximum entropy, land and water commingled chaotically. There wasn’t much further downhill they could go."

"Who the fuck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat."

"That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny."

"But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing."

"Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional!"

"She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future."

"I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that."

"Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He like to think he was at least making different mistakes."

"It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. He couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something."

"One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that, the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly."

"She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else."

"She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread."

"“Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.” A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood."

"It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit."

"It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible."

"Even on the first day we invaded Plover’s house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they’re too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely."

"Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives."

"This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is."

"When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise."

"We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teaming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind."

"Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand."

"“What do you think magic is for?” “I dunno. Don’t answer a question with a question.” “I used to think about this a lot,” Quentin said. “I mean, it’s not obvious like it is in books. It’s trickier. In books there’s always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world’s in danger, evil’s on the rise, but if you’re really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine. “But in real life that guy never turns up. He’s never there. He’s busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t. There’s no answers in the back of the book."

"Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip."

"“How’s it going?” “Pretty well,” Quentin said. “I’m not dead.”"

"He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping and uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he had much practice at."

"Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence."

"Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected."

"“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”"

"Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in someways—you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability."

"He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was."

"“Are you smart?” There was no non-embarrassing answer to this. “I guess.” “Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.”"

"…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better."

"All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead."

"But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on."

"Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will."