Brian DiMattia

“What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer-a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory-into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values...more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend:

Epply
World's Cleanest Airport
Omaha, NE

God bless our relentless idiotic optimism.”
― Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

“And now to that Victim whose Sign rose above the world two thousand years ago, to be menaced now by that other sign now rising, I say a prayer of contrition. I, whom you have seen as irreverent and irreligious, now pray in the name of Chuckler and Hoosier and Runner, in the name of Smoothface, Gentlemen, Amish, and Oakstump, Ivy-League and Big-Picture, in the name of all those who suffered in the jungles and on the beaches, from Anzio to Normandy--and in the name of the immolated: of Texan, Rutherford, Chicken, Loudmouth, of the Artist and White-Man, Souvenirs and Racehorse, Dreadnought and Commando--of all these and the others, dear Father, forgive us for that awful cloud.”
― Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow

“At one point, so many people had assembled on the bridge that linked the ship to the shore that the timbers began to creak and groan. Suddenly, there was a tremendous crack and a hundred or more people were plunged into the muddy river. Wiser heads might have seen this as a warning that Elizabethan technology did not always match its enthusiasm.”
― Giles Milton i Samurai William i