"Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately."
— Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End)

"Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"I never avoid something that challenges my guts and my heart. While I might occasionally puke my guts out, I have never puked my heart out."
— Michael Scott

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and the are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its intentions were. I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me--they looked almost comically nonaggressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree--but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson