""Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.""
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore."
— Diane Ackerman

"Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to."
— George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone)

"A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.
"Grammy's here!" he shouts.
He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush."
— George Saunders (In Persuasion Nation)

"I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin..."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics))