Book Gleanings

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The Marvels #1

Written by Kurt Busiek

Art by Yildiray Cinar & Richard Isanove

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Unwritten #47 written by Mike Carey art by Peter Gross

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It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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Death is not a supernatural event; it is an event of the most materialistic character, and may certainly be postponed, by the united efforts of the human race, to a period far more distant from the date of birth than has been the case during the historic period. The question has often been debated in my mind whether death is or is not wholly preventible; whether, if the entire human race were united in their efforts to eliminate causes of decay, death might not also be altogether eliminated.

The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography by Richard Jefferies

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We all love mysteries in books and hate them in life.

“The Man Who Was Present” in The Uncertainty Principle by Dmitri Bilenkin

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“The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual.”

Adolph Hitler in Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews 

by Richard Breiting and Edouard Calic

(also published as Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931)

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Majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong.

Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes

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What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

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“Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.”

Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling

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Champions #2 Marvel Comics (2012) written by Eve L. Ewing art by Simone Di Meo, Bob Quinn, and  Federico Blee

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How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a humane intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race.

The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography by Richard Jefferies

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The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn

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Spider-Verse #2 written by Ryan North art by Pere Perez

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War is Hell #14 Script: Chris Claremont Pencils and Inks: George Evans

reprinted in: We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust Craig Yoe (Editor)

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“I like people who see life with eyes different from everyone else’s, who think about things in a way that’s different from most people….Maybe it’s because I’ve always lived with people who are too normal and satisfied with themselves….I’m sure my mother and brothers are certain of their indisputable usefulness in this world, and know at every moment what they want, what they think is bad, and what they think is good….And have suffered very little anguish over anything.”

Ena in Nada by Carmen Laforet translated by Edith Grossman

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I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me.

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin