There are memories in the smoking of a cigarette

"I've always wanted to be a writer," he said. "Right out there in that room tonight there were forty or fifty good stories. I tried to write when I was a young man but I had no staying power. I'd get started in a burst of energy and goodwill and then I'd just fade out and die. Let's face it, I was born to be an insurance agent. But the thing gnaws at me even now, lad. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping and I get out of bed and light a cigarette and sit by the open window. And I get this bittersweet feeling about my life and what I've done and what I haven't done. You're too young to understand that. But there's something poetic about sitting by an open window at midnight smoking a cigarette. The cigarette is part of it. There are memories in the smoking of a cigarette. I just sit there thinking about my life. I killed three Japanese in the war that I know of. I'm telling you these things because they'll be useful to you someday."

--Don DeLillo, Americana (1971)

The real work of planet-saving

XXIII. The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love), pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous. 

XXIV. The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to many such people. 

XXV. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem—to face the great problem one small life at a time.

—Wendell Berry, "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse" (1991)

'like a book you have read too quickly'

"Things happen, people change," is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.

—Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

'a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes'

I was overcome with a sense of my own defilement. Though I returned to Tokyo I did nothing for days but shut myself up in my room. My memory remained fixed on the dead rather than the living. The rooms I had set aside in there for Naoko were shuttered, the furniture draped in white, the windowsills dusty. I spent the better part of each day in those rooms. And I thought about Kizuki. . . . Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another part of me into that world. Sometimes I feel like the caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.

—Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987; trans. J. Rubin 2000)