Interesting Sentences from Books I'm Reading

"Music… is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next."

—Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs:

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

"Unless I can combine poetry with recorded noise, have I any right to be?"

—Morissey, Autobiography

"[T]hough we may tell ourselves that we are royally pushing analogies around from the heights of our conscious thrones, the truth is otherwise: we are really at the mercy of our own seething myriads of unconscious analogies, much as a powerful ruler is really responding to the collective will of their people, because if they were regularly going against their people, they would soon be dethroned."

—Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences:

Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

"Science can always explain, qua mathematical eccentricities, that and how a strange thing happens, but can it explain anything about the why?"

—Erik Fosnes Hansen, Tales of Protection (Nadia Christensen, transl.)

"Lionel was there, a great white shape, leaning on the open door with his brow pressed to his raised wrist, panting huskily, and giving off a faint grey steam in his purple singlet (the lift was misbehaving, and the flat was on the thirty-third floor—but then again Lionel could give off steam while dozing in bed on a quiet afternoon)."

—Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo

"And anyway I show up at that party they had for homecoming week in first year and I start making out with the poster of Van Morrison, like I've pinned poor Van against the wall and am sexually assaulting him, and you guys are like Oh my god that's the guy from the freshman mixer who chugged all the purple Jesus right out of the barrel and then vomited into the barrel and then started chugging that, who in Christ's name let him in?"

—Lynn Coady, The Antagonist

"Then they leave the area, a little sick at what they have done, especially the orange, who several times becomes so distraught it stops rolling altogether, and must be picked up and hurled down the path by Jim the penisless man, who, turns out, has a very good arm."

—George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation