Rogue Reader

“I can understand the feeling of a man struggling to escape the practical slavery imposed by the multitude of obligations which crowd upon a man who tries to be a good citizen. Root writes to Jack Morgan in 1927 about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Michael Gross' Rogues Gallery”
― Michael Gross

“In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over a desk in the carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mess. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags and beside him a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There's a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages, until with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can't consume the words fast enough.

"Come on," says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet, intent occupant-- earnestly, frantically reading.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Once upon a time we knew how to die. We knew how to sit at a deathbed. We knew how to die and how to sit because we saw people we loved die all through infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, and old age: deaths we could not make painless, deaths no machine could postpone. The deaths of our ancestors were not pretty. Some died roaring in pain. But through the centuries we tutored ourselves in the art of dying by handing down stories about how those we loved met their deaths.”
― Katy Butler, Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death