The best thing about being rich.

"Hey, tell me, what d'you think the best thing is about being rich?" 

"Beats me." 

"Being able to say you don't have any money. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we do something, she could say, 'Sorry, I don't have any money.' Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said 'I don't have any money,' it would really mean 'I don't have any money.' It's sad. Like if a pretty girl says 'I look terrible today, I don't want to go out,' that's O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her. That's what the world was like for me. For six years, until last year." 

"You'll get over it." 

"I hope so. College is such a relief! It's full of ordinary people!" 

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

'consequence has its tax'

"Therefore, Sir Walter, what I would take leave to suggest is, that if in consequence of any rumours getting abroad of your intention—which must be contemplated as a possible thing, because we know how difficult it is to keep the actions and designs of one part of the world from the notice and curiosity of the other,—consequence has its tax—I, John Shepherd, might conceal any family-matters that I chose, for nobody would think it worth their while to observe me, but Sir Walter Elliot has eyes upon him which it may be very difficult to elude—"

—Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)

'the land of sunshine'

But down on Main Street, down on Towne and San Pedro, and for a mile on lower Fifth Street were the tens of thousands of others; they couldn’t afford sunglasses or a four-bit polo shirt and they hid in the alleys by day and slunk off to flop houses at night. A cop won’t pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he’ll grab you. So get yourselves a polo shirt boys, and a pair of sunglasses, and white shoes, if you can. Be collegiate. It’ll get you anyway. After a while, after big doses of the Times and the Examiner, you too will whoop it up for the sunny south. You’ll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semi-tropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.

—John Fante, Ask The Dust (1939)

'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)

'when but a finger of one of us is hurt'

And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the same thing?

Quite true. 

Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the individual—as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a centre and forming one kingdom under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all together with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in his finger; and the same expression is used about any other part of the body, which has a sensation of pain at suffering or of pleasure at the alleviation of suffering.

Very true, he replied; and I agree with you that in the best-ordered State there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you describe.

Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with him?

Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.

—Plato, The Republic, Book V (360 B.C.E.; trans. B. Jowett 1894)

'snap and bite at every trifle'

And at this period she was absorbed in becoming a young lady. She was intelligent enough, but not interested in learning. At first, she thought all the girls at school very ladylike and wonderful, and she wanted to be like them. She came to a speedy disillusion: they galled and maddened her, they were petty and mean. After the loose, generous atmosphere of her home, where little things did not count, she was always uneasy in the world, that would snap and bite at every trifle.

—D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

'like a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach'

In 1953, the fashionable streets of New York bloomed with Belle Epoque nostalgia. Cristobal Balenciaga was enjoying the pinnacle of his career. Bustles, hoops, corsets, and crispy crinolines flared under his confections. Like the dressmakers of the nineteenth century, Balenciaga could actually cut and sew, and his refined technique reflected the era's desire for elegance. Christian Dior had ushered in this stylized, hyperfeminine silhouette in 1947 with his New Look. His boned bodices, nipped waists, and bouffant skirts hit the postwar generation like a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach. A New Look dress required dozens of meters of extra fabric--thrilling after years of wartime austerity.

—Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (2013)

The gantlet.

I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. . . . Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses, and company expected about these times. For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854)

'so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable'

It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the architecture of Mr. Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we begin the search again.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

'I have an unfortunate disposition'

“‘Now look here, Maksim Maksimich,’ he [Pechorin] answered, ‘I have an unfortunate disposition: whether it is my upbringing that made me thus or whether God created me so, I don’t know: I only know that if I am a cause of unhappiness for others, I am no less happy myself. Naturally, that is poor comfort for them, nevertheless, this is a fact. In my early youth, from the minute I emerged from under my family’s supervision, I began madly to enjoy every pleasure that money could buy, and, naturally, those pleasures became repulsive to me. Then I ventured out into the grand monde, and, soon, I became likewise fed up with society: I have been in love with fashionable belles, and have been loved, but their love only irritated my imagination and vanity, while my heart remained empty ... I began to read, to study—I got just as sick of studies—I saw that neither fame nor happiness depended on them in the least, since the happiest people are dunces, while fame is a question of luck, and in order to obtain it, you only have to be nimble. Then I began to be bored ... Soon after, I was transferred to the Caucasus: this was the happiest time of my life. I hoped that boredom did not exist among Chechen bullets. In vain! After one month, I got so used to their buzzing and to the nearness of death, that, really, I paid more attention to the mosquitoes, and I was even more bored than before, because I had almost lost my last hope. When I saw Bela in my home, when for the first time I held her in my lap and kissed her black curls, I—fool that I was—imagined she was an angel sent me by compassionate fate ... I was wrong again. The love of a wild girl was little better than that of a lady of rank; the ignorance and the naïveté of one pall on you as much as the coquetry of the other. I still like her, I suppose; I am grateful to her for several rather sweet moments; I am ready to die for her—only I find her company dull. Whether I am a fool or a villain, I don’t know; but of one thing I’m sure, that I also deserve pity, even perhaps more than she. My soul has been impaired by the fashionable world, I have a restless fancy, an insatiable heart; whatever I get is not enough; I become used as easily to sorrow as to delight, and my life becomes more empty day by day; there is only one remedy left for me: to travel. As soon as I can, I shall set out—but not for Europe, God preserve! I shall go to America, to Arabia, to India—perchance I may die somewhere, on the way! At least, I am sure that this last consolation will not soon be exhausted with the help of storms and bad roads.’ He went on like this for a long time, and his words became engraved in my memory because it was the first time that I had heard such things from a man of twenty-five, and I hope to God it may also be the last ... ”

—Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1839/rev. 1841) (trans. Vladimir Nabokov w/ Dmitri Nabokov 1958)

I am not ashamed...

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed at myself for having at one time been ashamed. About eighty-five years ago they were told they were free, united with others of our country in everything pertaining to the common good, and, in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand. And they believed it. They exulted in it. They stayed in their place, worked hard, and brought up my father to do the same.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

It is one of those fables...

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," An Oration Delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837