I was just reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and I felt t — Tim O'Brien (author)

"Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You cant fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you cant make them undead."

"At night, when I couldnt sleep, Id sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. Id be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didnt understand and didnt want to understand."

"I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasnt thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldnt happen. I was above it."

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but its a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys start to smile but hes dead. Thats a true story that never happened."

"Well, I still dont get it, she said. The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail. And thats bad? No. Not exactly. What then? She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. I dont know, it just seem strange, sort of. How youve figured everything out, all the angles, except what its for. For us, he said. I love you, Kath. But it feels — I shouldnt say this — it feels manipulating.... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)"

"They carried the soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

"Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading."

"In a Thumbnail Sketch here is [the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness] so far:There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their talents may more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves part of the design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind."

"Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here? Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully."

"Far transcend my weak invention. ’Tis a simple Christian child, Missionary young and mild, From her store of script’ral knowledge (Bible-taught without a college) Which by reading she could gather, Teaches him to say Our Father To the common Parent, who Colour not respects nor hue. White and Black in him have part, Who looks not to the skin, but heart."

"The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angells most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of."

"“Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as “the information highway”) is, as a friend of mine has it, “like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fans personal catalog of bootlegs. “But it’s from Japan!” She isnt moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden."