Freedom means that one isn't needed anywhere.

Carl shook his head mournfully. "Freedom so often means that one is n't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)

'the great fact was the land itself'

The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

—Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)

'What in water did Bloom ... admire?'

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

—James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

'none of the modern fear of inaccuracy'

Much as we admire his progressive spirit and the catholicity of his taste, what gives the Lives their immortality is the quality of great passion that can be felt in every line, the fact that, apart from its value as a source of information, it is, above all, a true work of literature. Perhaps it was a good thing that in Vasari's time there was none of the modern fear of inaccuracy. If this always busy, always impatient, man had been required to spend much time on the verification of facts, he might have told us only one-tenth of what we now have . . .

—Alfred Werner, introduction to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1957)

I think He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians

"Do you actually believe in that man called Jesus?"

"Yes, I do. I told you that before. But the Jesus that I believe in is not the one preached by the Church or the padres. I cannot ally myself with the padres who invoke the name of the Lord when they burn the altars of the Indians, and drive them from their villages, claiming that they do it in order to spread the Lord's word."

"How can you revere such a miserable, wretched fellow? How can you worship someone so ugly and emaciated? I can't understand it..." 

For the first time the samurai asked the question in earnest. Nishi gazed up at the renegade monk from a crouched position, waiting to hear his reply. From the swamp they could hear the strange voices of women doing their washing. 

"In the old days," the man nodded, "I had the same doubts. But I can believe in Him now because the life He lived in this world was more wretched than any other man's. Because He was ugly and emaciated. He knew all there was to know about the sorrows of this world. He could not close His eyes to the grief and agony of mankind. That is what made Him emaciated and ugly. Had He lived an exalted, powerful life beyond our grasp, I would not feel like this about Him." 

The samurai could not understand what the renegade monk was saying. 

"He understands the hearts of the wretched, because His entire life was wretched. He knows the agonies of those who die a miserable death, because He died in misery. He was not in the least powerful. He was not beautiful." 

"But look at the Church. Look at the city of Rome," Nishi countered. "The cathedrals we saw were all like golden palaces, and not even the people of Mexico City could imagine the grandeur of the mansion where the Pope lives." 

"Do you think that is what He would have wished?" the man shook his head angrily. "Do you think He is to be found within those garish cathedrals? He does not dwell there. He lives...not within such buildings. I think He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians." 

"Why?" 

"That is how He spent His life," replied the renegade monk in a voice filled with assurance, then he lowered his eyes to the ground and repeated the same words to himself. "That is how he lived His life. He never visited the houses of those who were puffed up or contented. He sought out only the ugly, the wretched, the miserable and the sorrowful. But now even the bishops and priests here are complacent and swollen with pride. They are no longer the sort of people He sought after."

--Shusaku Endo, The Samurai (1980; trans. Van C. Gessel, 1982)