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Quotes from books I’m reading

@sagepassages.bsky.social

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Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

From “On the Calculation of Volume II” by Solvej Balle (Barbara J. Haveland, trans.) #quotes #books #future #seasons

“Suddenly I see that this is how my life will be, year after year. That my seasons book is my manual, my traveling companion, my guide. That what I am building is my future. If I am to have a future I must have years, and if I am to have years, I must have seasons. Without seasons, no time. If I want seasons, I will have to build them myself. If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself. I put the pieces together, little fragments of season and I write it all down in my manual: the ingredients of the seasons.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

From “James” by Percival Everett #booksky #reading #quotes

“I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them.
It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.
I pulled my sack of books closer, reached in and touched one. I let my hand linger there, a flirtation of sorts. The small thick book I'd wrapped my fingers around was the novel. I had never read a novel, though I understood the concept of fiction. It wasn't so unlike religion, or history, for that matter.
I pulled the book from the bag. I checked to see if Huck was still sleeping soundly and then I opened it. The smell of the pages was glorious.
In the country of Westphalia...
I was somewhere else. I was not on one side of that damn river or the other. I was not on the Mississippi. I was not in Missouri.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

From “The Infinite Blacktop” by Sara Gran #quotes #booksky #clairedewitt

"I know how you feel," Worth said. "Sometimes the past comes up on us like a ghost. Sometimes life is like a haunted house. But there's no way to leave. You just have to make your peace with the ghosts."

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

From “The Long Good-bye” by Raymond Chandler #law #bookquotes #lawsky #books

“A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

From “The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. #Fascism #Inauguration

“The images of a nation as it approached zero hour: the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol plaza.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

From “Democracy Dies As Awful Man No Longer Able To Freely Drive 18 Blocks In Manhattan” by David Roth (Defector, Jan. 7, 2025) @davidjroth.bsky.social @defector.bsky.social #CongestionPricing #urbanism #CarBrain

“These news outlets
and the hideous news influencers mimicking them exist not so much to misinform people as to keep people who refuse to learn basic shit in their preferred state of furious unknowing-not just uninformed, but vigorously counter-informed and convinced that something both terrible and vague is being done to them.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

From “The Biography of X” by Catherine Lacey #BookSky #Quotes

Of course I didn't. Not really. Not then. Let's not speak of such things, she said, and this became our agreement.
New lovers are gf always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands. We rarely spoke about those who had abandoned us or those we had abandoned. They were all dead to us now.

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

From “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick #BookSky #Quotes #Resist

“
But what does it matter? Even if Doctor Goebbels is deposed and Operation Dandelion is canceled? They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus.
No wonder Mr. Tagomi could not go on, he thought. The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same...
Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion.
Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.
He thought, We can only hope. And try.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

From “Talking to My Daughter About the Economy” by Yanis Varoufakis

“When you feel as if you're about to give
in to the idea that outrageous inequality is somehow unavoidable, remember how it all begins: with babies born naked into a society that segregates those it will dress up in expensive outfits and the others, whom it condemns to hunger, exploitation and misery. Maintain your outrage but sensibly, tactically, so that when the time comes you can invest it in what needs to be done to make our world truly logical, natural and just.”

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Get thee to a fun-ery @joedacey.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

From “Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture” by Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social

I bought tickets for me and my son, who was already a die-hard MST3K fan at thirteen, just a year younger than I was when I saw Time of the Apes in 1989. The series had never been on TV during his lifetime, but he didn't care. When I told Hodgson about Dylan's abiding love for his creation, he wasn't surprised. "Kids like the show—and they don't have a problem with references they don't understand, because their life is like that. They're constantly being confronted with things they don't understand, but they start to find meaning in the words and the tone in which they're delivered. The way we move into the world is the same way. You kind of learn things by proxy."

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

From “Hocus Pocus” by Kurt Vonnegut #Booksky #Quotes #KurtVonnegut

"I don't know anybody or anything.
Please don't ever talk to me again. Tell everybody to stop talking to me."

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

From “Erasure” by Percival Everett #fascism #art

Ernst Kirchner: I'm glad, no proud that those brown shirts are burning my paintings.
Max Klinger: What do you mean?
Kirchner: Imagine how I would feel if monsters like that tolerated my work.

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

From “Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters” by Rebecca Solnit

“Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that's what we get, over and over, and from it we don't get much of a picture of how change actually happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. "Unhappy the land that needs heroes" is a line of Bertolt Brecht's I've gone to dozens of times, but now I'm more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn't know it has lots and what they look like.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

From “Blood in my Eye” by George Jackson #Booksky #Prison #Bookquotes #GerogeJackson

“Prisons were not institutionalized on such a massive scale by the people. Most people realize that crime is simply the result of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege, a reflection of the present state of property relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so few in the general prison population that we can discount them altogether. Imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outset.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

From “Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America” by Charles Bowden

“I can feel the roots moving across the land, gouging new channels through our eager flesh, seeking blood. The flower will bloom, the fragrance will remind us of good times. We will go willingly with a smile on our lips and love in our hearts. We will go because we do not want to learn another way to live. We would rather die.
Or, perhaps, a voice will come down from the moun-tain, a bush will burn, new tablets of stone will heave into view like spacecraft. We could turn it all around and kill the garden. We could share food with the hungry, shelter with the people freezing in the storm. Love with the people who are crying in the rain. Take power. The answers are as simple as the questions.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

From “The Timelines of our Lives” by Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social (WIRED Nov. 18, 2020)

“We speak of the Before Times as if there was a single moment when we could have chosen not to disappear down the wrong trouser leg of history. In fact, it takes a lot more than a squashed butterfly, a stray bullet, or even a stolen election to make modern fascism happen. We cannot get to the After Times without acknowledging that, yes, mistakes have been made, that there is a sadistic kink in the arc of history, that the world has changed for the worse-and that that did not happen overnight. In fact, a great many people have been living through the Worst Timeline for many generations.”

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

From “The Crisis of the Old Order 1919-1933” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

“The images of a nation as it approached zero hour: the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol plaza.”

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Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

From “Mother Night” by Kurt Vonnegut

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
"It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

“Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” by Noor Hindi

“Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli
tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the
moon.
Palestinians don't see the moon from jail cells and
prisons.
It's so beautiful, the moon.
They re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy
Ramadan.
I know I'm American because when I walk into a
room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I'll write about the flowers like we own them.”

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Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

From “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk

“But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection. So says our Blake.”

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Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

From “The Heart of Caring” by Mark Vonnegut

“It makes no more sense to privatize medical care the way we have than it does to privatize fire departments and allow them to sell variable degrees of coverage with co-payments and deduct-ibles. They probably wouldn't cover some cities at all-like, say, Baltimore. Why should my taxes pay for your fire? Corporations got to buy what once belonged to everyone and rent it back to us one patient at a time.”

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Get thee to a fun-ery @joedacey.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

go.bsky.app/fSTPRC #Baltimore starter pack #hon

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 08/07/2024

From “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood #TheBlindAssassin #MargaretAtwood #Apocalypse #Death #EndOfTheWorld #BookQuotes @margaretatwood.bsky.social

But not here; not in this gentle, tedious backwater; not in Port Ticonderoga, despite a druggie or two in the parks, despite the occasional break-in, despite the occasional body found floating around in the eddies. We hunker down here, drinking our bedtime drinks, nibbling our bedtime snacks, peering at the world as if through a secret window, and when we've had enough of it we turn it off. So much for the twentieth century, we say, as we make our way upstairs. But there's a far-off roaring, like a tidal wave racing inshore. Here comes the twenty-first century, sweeping overhead like a spaceship filled with ruthless lizard-eyed aliens or a metal pterodactyl. Sooner or later it will sniff us out, it will tear the roofs off our flimsy little burrows with its iron claws, and then we will be just as naked and shivering and starving and diseased and hopeless as the rest.
Excuse this digression. At my age you indulge in these apocalyptic visions. You say, The end of the world is at hand. You

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Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 04/07/2024

…2/2 Extended Holiday Excerpt from “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut #BreakfastOfChampions #Vonnegut #Bookquotes #4thOfJuly

Breakfast of Champions
of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:
Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves.
They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
• The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
Color was everything.
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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
* Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium ni-trate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas.
This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily, so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
• When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries

Breakfast of Champions
the people, who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time-kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.
In some places people would actually try to eat mud or suck on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away.
And so on.
* Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Com-munism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to.
So they didn't have to.
* Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold onto it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do.
Others couldn't get their hands on doodley-squat.

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 04/07/2024

1/2 Extended holiday excerpt from “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut #July4 #IndependenceDay #America #KurtVonnegut

chapter 1
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.
The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.
• Listen:
Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short.
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This was their national anthem, which was pure balder-dash, like so much they were expected to take seriously:
O, say can you see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight
Ơer the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
* There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.
Here is what their flag looked like:
众
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Breakfast of Champions
It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had about its flag, which said this: "The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing."
Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful sa-lute, which consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again.
• The motto of Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: "E pluribus unum."
The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren't for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, "In nonsense is strength."
* A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless edu-cation, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
1492
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the
them.
year in which sea

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 03/07/2024

From “Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick” by Jason Pargin @jasonkpargin.bsky.social #ZoeyAshe #Quotes #Bookquotes #power #psychopaths

Will cut her off. "Being against power is easy, Zoey, because you never, ever need to offer solutions or take risks. Exercising power in
the right way is what's hard. This system favors psychopaths in the same way that basketball favors the tall.

Quotes from books I’m reading @sagepassages.bsky.social · 03/07/2024

From “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin #kindness #UrsulaKLeGuin #quotes #Booksky #SciFi

There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center
of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warm-est. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.
We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.