just a reader.

January 3, 2016

Number 85 stole the show, which was only just. He took the flashbulbs and all the talk and hubbub without blinking or even fidgeting, as if he had been waiting all along for his moment in the spotlight. Of course, the ape had been, as it were, overtrained for such a moment and was long past being able to let such things alter his behavior. Number 85 had been in rooms full of bright lights and large numbers of human beings before. Noise, vibrations, oscillations, weightlessness, space flight, fame—what earthy difference did it make compared to the shocks and the box?

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff.

January 2, 2016

According to Wikipedia, in the United States alone there are at least six haunted hospitals and insane asylums, and five haunted hotels, including, notoriously, the Chelsea in Manhattan, where Dylan Thomas, Eugene O'Neill, and Thomas Wolfe have been seen after their deaths. There are also ghostly theatres, cinemas, schools, colleges, and prisons. Mental hospitals are notoriously haunted by former patients and attendants; factories are haunted by the spirits of workers who died there, lighthouses by their keepers, and in Sunnyvale, California, there is a haunted Toys 'R' Us.

Alison Lurie, The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us.

January 1, 2016

In other words, how far back into the past one goes in order to establish the beginnings of one's own tradition or cultural idiom is not only relative but even at best is also, on close inspection, very likely to be downright arbitrary and quite in accordance with some specific functional combination of desirable skills and attitudes in terms of which one wishes to project oneself.

Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans.