BAC > BAC's Quotes

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
― Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police

“Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“Flattery from a man who displayed no common sense or self-control, much less reverence for God, meant nothing to him. “I”
― Lynn Austin, Return to Me

“No matter what came next, Daniel rested safely in the grip of his Sovereign God.”
― Lynn Austin, Return to Me

“The Last Canyon by John Vernon is a beautiful retelling of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and his and his men’s inevitable and tragic clash with a tribe of Paiute Indians who lived on the canyon’s northern edge.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes’s insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China, including numerous subplots, a gazillion characters, and a touching love story.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The so-called “scar literature” first appeared in China in the late 1970s, when the men and women who survived the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution began writing about their experiences in both fiction and nonfiction. Two of the best novels are Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, the story of two young boys—children of the hated intelligentsia—who are sent to a remote mountain village to be reeducated, and Dai Houying’s Stones of the Wall, one of the earliest (and still one of the best) novels about the effects of the Cultural Revolution, which is set in the late 1970s around a group of college professors who are trying to rebuild lives thrown into despair and uncertainty by the cataclysm. (This is a novel I’ve remembered vividly since I first read it in 1985.)”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman’s The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Both Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae and Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War are well-told accounts of crucial events in Greek history.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in many ways defines the spy genre; it introduces the grand theme of ferreting out the Russian agent high up in British intelligence.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I’ve ever read is David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War–era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that a Russian agent has infiltrated the upper echelons of the CIA.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Three books set in Iran—first a novel about two lovers caught up in the Iranian Revolution, then two books about Iran since the Revolution: The Persian Bride by James Buchan The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran by Robin B. Wright Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Wild Life by Molly Gloss Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The best place to begin is with the Library of America’s two-volume collection, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Together they include all the major writers as well as bring some lesser-known authors to a wider audience. In general chronological order, here are some depths to which you can lower yourself:”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Paul Cain is an early, influential figure in this genre, who is now quite hard to find even in used bookstores and libraries. His 1932 Fast One was a noir landmark; it”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); José Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (the setting of his novel Three Trapped Tigers—pre-Castro Havana—reminded me of Oscar Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody From When the World Was Good).”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“If you read no other work of what’s known as “cyberpunk” (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including “cyberpunk” itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Food played a major role in the lives of both Ruth Reichl (longtime New York Times restaurant critic and editor-in-chief of Gourmet, who wrote about her lifelong interest in food in two memoirs, the best of which is the first, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table) and Patricia Volk (who wrote about her life in Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family).”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Daddy Was a Numbers Runner by Louise Meriwether is the story of Francie Coffin, who is growing up in the spirit-deadening ghettos of Harlem in the 1930s, in a family struggling to survive intact.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In The Jew of New York, Ben Katchor draws on a historical event—the early-nineteenth-century plan to set up a Jewish homeland in upstate New York—to create a weirdly real world of make-believe. Or”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Erskine Caldwell’s stories of rural poverty (Tobacco Road) and”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Amitav Ghosh’s multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan’s two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It’s”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In its descriptions of a family trying to find suitable mates for three sisters, The Makioka Sisters by Junichir ō Tanizaki brings to mind the novels of Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Other good reading from Japan includes Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, with its heroine who finds whatever comfort she can in food; Miyuki”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason