Benjamin

“him. He had connections here, of course, and that was the problem. His mind sensed the lives lost to make the unlovely Dawn of Fire, the many thousands of humans living in squalor required to keep it running. No matter how comfortable he made his chambers, and there were definite limits to that, he felt as if he were dwelling in a pavilion erected upon a platform, and though the pavilion was very fine, beneath the platform squirmed piles of vermin feeding desperately upon each other in the dark.”
― Guy Haley, The Silent King

“The crimes of a father or the carelessness of a mother can defile the taste of oyster dressing and giblet gravy on the brightest Thanksgiving Day. Birthday parties are an abomination. I hated them even when I was a child, especially mine. Long ago, I decided I liked funerals far more than I did weddings. The pretense of being festive at these events is both crushing and debilitating to me. Feigned happiness and forced bonhomie take a toll on my spirit that deflates me for a week.”
― Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

“Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“As we know and have always known, there is in this country a vast and inveterate minority (about 35 per cent) whose sympathies lie not with the silently studious protestors, in Greensboro, but with the rejectionists yelling in their ears and pouring sodas on their heads and then beating them to the ground; not with six-year-old Ruby Bridges, in New Orleans, but with the hate-warped face of the housewife in the picket line brandishing a black doll in a toy coffin. …Is”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story