'a radiant doughnut'

When I became a writer, I went to Los Angeles many times to work on magazine pieces and books. On those visits, I had been to and from the beach, and up and down the canyons, and in and out of the valley, and back and forth to the mountains, but I never gave downtown Los Angeles a second thought, assuming it was just a glassy landscape of office buildings that hollowed out by five o’clock every night. I pictured Los Angeles as a radiant doughnut, rimmed by milky ocean and bristling mountains, with a big hole in the middle.

—Susan Orlean, The Library Book (2018)

'revisiting and rearranging words'

After school, I kept reading and rearranging the words I’d written, trying to understand what the words meant for my understanding of violence. For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.

—Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018)

'here was a man...who had never been elected to anything'

I'll never forget this. I walked into the press room to find a stack of press releases from Robert Moses announcing that a "study" of the bridge, an obvious first step toward its construction, would begin immediately—with the participation of the state. And now, when I went back to the same officials who had assured me they were firmly against the bridge, I found there had been a change in their position. They were now firmly for it. 

I remember I drove home that night, and all the way down from Albany to our house on Long Island—it was 163 miles—I kept thinking, Everything you've been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you're in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he's had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. 

And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.

—Robert A. Caro, Working (2019)

'reality is lost to him forever'

It happens that a man sometimes sees such a thing in a dream, and afterwards he dwells on this dream all his life, reality is lost to him forever, and he is decidedly good for nothing anymore. Her name was Ulinka.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'The current generation now sees everything clearly'

There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, even a child would not make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king’s mansions! Broader and more splendid than all the other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other’s eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel'

In short, it was all just right, as neither nature nor art can contrive, but as only occurs when they join together, when, after the heaped-up, often senseless, labors of men, nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel, lightening the heavy masses, removing the crude-feeling regularity and indigent gaps through which the bare, undisguised plan peeps out, and imparts a wondrous warmth to all that was created in coldly measured cleanness and neatness.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'an aptly spoken Russian word'

Aptly uttered is as good as written, an axe cannot destroy it. And oh, how apt is everything that comes from deep Russia, where there are no German, or Finnish, or any other tribes, but all is native natural-born, lively and pert Russian wit, which does not fish for a word in its pockets, does not brood on it like a hen on her chicks, but pastes it on at once, like a passport, for eternal wear . . . 

As a numberless multitude of churches and monasteries with their cupolas, domes, and crosses is scattered over holy, pious Russia, so a numberless multitude of tribes, generations, peoples also throngs, ripples, and rushes over the face of the earth. And each of these peoples, bearing within itself the pledge of its strength, filled with the creative capacity of the soul, with its own marked peculiarity and other gifts of God, is in an original fashion distinguished by its own word, which, whatever subject it may express, reflects in that expression a portion of its character. A knowledge of hearts and a wise comprehension of life resound in the word of the Briton; like a nimble fop the short-lived word of the Frenchman flashes and scatters; whimsically does the German contrive his lean, intelligent word, not accessible to all; but there is no word so sweeping, so pert, so bursting from beneath the very heart, so ebullient and vibrant with life, as an aptly spoken Russian word.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

we try to find stability in chance encounters

In this uninterrupted stream of women, men, children, and dogs that pass by and end up lost from sight among the streets, it would be nice to hold on to a face once in a while. Yes, according to Bowing, amidst the maelstrom that is a large city, you had to find a few fixed points.  

...Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.  

...I took the envelope from my pocket and I pored over the pictures for a long while. Where was she now? In a cafe, like me, sitting alone at a table? Doubtless the phrase he had spoken earlier had given me this idea: "It's all about trying to create ties." Encounters in the street, in a Metro station at rush hour. We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment. What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course? An anonymous office where you dictate a letter to a temp typist, a ground-floor apartment in Neuilly whose white, empty walls evoke what some would call a "showroom apartment," where there would be no trace left of your stay. Two photo-booth snapshots, one facing the camera, one in profile. And that's what we're supposed to forge links with?

--Patrick Modiano, In the Cafe of Lost Youth (2007, trans. Chris Clarke).

'intelligence without traditions'

For a few minutes my father-in-law seemed to soften his judgment (After all, it’s difficult for all of us to orient ourselves in the chaos of the Italian crisis, and I can understand that young men like him find themselves in trouble, especially when they have a desire to act), then he rose to go to his study. But before he disappeared he had a second thought. He paused in the doorway and uttered harshly: But there is doing and doing, Sarratore is intelligence without traditions, he would rather be liked by those in charge than fight for an idea, he’ll become a very useful technocrat. . . . 

. . . I hoped that Adele would find a conciliating phrase that might soothe me, and so I asked: 

“What does it mean that Nino is intelligence without traditions?” 

She looked at me ironically. 

“That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else. The result is that this Signor Sarratore is an unreliable person.” 

“I, too, am an intelligence without traditions.” 

She smiled. 

“Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable.” 

—Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (2015, trans. A. Goldstein)

and the canal would still be there too

Again the longest day was past. The days were getting shorter--it was still barely noticeable but we knew it was happening, this summer too would pass. Again the day came to an end, again the bright red above the horizon grew pale, the water in the distance kept its color, but barely, darkness crept up everywhere, out of the earth, now the canal in the distance had vanished in the night. We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while all these things continued to exist. We would see the days get longer a few more times, then we wouldn't be young anymore. And after that, when the chestnut trees had blossomed red or white a few more times, we would die, in the prime of our lives or maybe as old men, which would be even worse. And the sky would be red again and the canal would still be there too, most likely, gold in the twilight, and they wouldn't notice any difference. 

--Nescio, "The Writing on the Wall," Amsterdam Stories (1913; trans. Damion Searls, 2012)