Anybody can be nobody.
Said Eugene V. Debs.
Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.
Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.
A lament of Schopenhauer's:
Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.
Two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to start me crying.
Said Proust.
Meanwhile, on page 93 of A History of Modern Computing, the words
The word "language" turned out to be a dangerous term, implying much more than its initial users foresaw. The English word is derived from the French langue, meaning tongue, implying that it is spoken.
can be found. Dinaw Mengestu's narrator, the shopkeeper Sepha Stephanos, has this to say:
On those good days, which come once or twice a week, I make just over four hundred dollars. I walk home at the end of the night feeling better, not only about my store, but about this country. I think to myself, America is beautiful after all. There is more here. Gas is cheap. This is not a bad place. Things could be worse. And what else could I have done?
"So then, you hate America today?" Kenneth says. He smiles a half-smile. He pours a little scotch into a Styrofoam cup he stole from his office and hands it to me. I know that if I let him, he would pull from his pocket the missing $26.16 and slide it into the cash register. Anything to make me feel better.
"With all my heart," I say to him.
