The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee

"People can be so loathsome, don't you think?" she says. "If we aren't together in the future, please don't think of me with hatred. Think of me kindly or forget me. I always try to do that. Think with kindness and don't judge. And know the entire situation." "What on earth are you saying? Don't take such absurd leaps." He feels like she's punched him in the stomach, cannot feign nonchalance, but cannot say too, don't leave me.

"You won't even look at me!" she cried. "You won't give me even that. You've always been mean with your attention, so measured." She looked down at herself. She had dressed with care this morning, mindful of the impression she wanted to give: quiet, not reproachful, confident. This had translated into a knee-length navy cotton voile dress with covered buttons all down the front, a few decorative pleats: tailored, not fussy, freshly washed hair held back with a navy satin headband. She tamped down the word that kept rising to the surface of her consciousness: fool, fool.

He shakes her. He wants to bite her cheek, viciously, until flesh tears off and blood runs down his chin. He wants to devour her whole, until she feels the pain he has been feeling. The pain he caused her too.

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

"It's funny," I said. "It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun, too, to be in love." "Do you think so?" her eyes looked flat again. "I don't mean fun that way. In a way it's an enjoyable feeling." "No," she said. "I think its hell on earth."

The Dead

The Dead by Jones Very

I see them crowd on crowd they walk the earth

Dry, leafless trees no Autumn wind laid bare;

And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,

And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;

No sap doth through their clattering branches flow,

Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;

Their hearts the living God have ceased to know,

Who gives the spring time to th'expectant year;

They mimic life, as if from him to steal

His glow of health to paint the livid cheek;

They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,

That with a seeming heart their tongue may speak;

And in their show of life more dead they live

Than those that to the earth with many tears they give.

Snow-Flakes

"Snow-Flakes" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take

Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

Even as the troubled heart doth make

In the white countenance confession,

The troubled sky reveals

The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,

Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair,

Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,

Now whispered and revealed

To wood and field.

Miles from Nowhere

Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun 

" 'I'm sorry about your mother,' he whispered. I felt a tiny collapsing in my chest and it took me a moment to correctly identify the pang, not as grief, but as jealousy. I hadn't loved my mother the way he had loved his wife. I had left her when she needed me most, and in the end, she died, in a car, completely alone with nothing but the sound of metal crushing her. I couldn't grieve for her, not because I didn't want to, but because I didn't deserve to. I looked at Mr. McCommon, his hands smother his face, his chest flinching. He had no idea that grief was a reward. That it only came to those who were loyal, to those who loved more than they were capable of. He had a garage, full of her belongings, and all I had was my guilt. It took on its own shape and smell and nestled in the pit of my body, and it would sleep and play and walk with me for decades to come."

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Quasimodo then lifted his eye to look upon the gypsy girl, whose body, suspended from the gibbet, he beheld quivering afar, under its white robes, in the last struggles of death; then again he dropped it upon the archdeacon, stretched a shapeless mass at the foot of the tower, and he said with a sob that heaved his deep breast to the bottom, 'Oh-all that I've ever loved!'

--Volume I, Book XI, Chapter II

Why We Can't Wait: Martin Luther King Jr.

Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.

"While Negroes were being appointed to some significant jobs, and social hospitality was being extended at the White House to Negro leaders, the dreams of the masses remained in tatters. The Negro felt that he recognized the same old bone that had been tossed to him in the past- only now it was being handed to him on a platter, with courtesy."

"... there is a certain bitter irony in the picture of his country championing freedom in foreign lands and failing to ensure that freedom to twenty million of its own."

"But alas! All the talk and publicity accompanying the centennial only served to remind the Negro that he still wasn't free, that he still lived a form of slavery disguised by certain niceties of complexity."

"They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the basis of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty. The average Negro is born into want and deprivation. His struggle to escape his circumstances is hindered by color discrimination. he is deprived of normal education and normal social and economic opportunities. When he seeks opportunity, he is told, in effect, to live himself by his own bootstraps, advice which does not take into account the fact that he is barefoot."

"The conservatives who say, 'Let us not move so fast,' and the extremists who say, 'Let us go out and whip the world,' would tell you that they are as far apart as the poles. But there is a striking parallel: They accomplish nothing; for they do not reach the people who have a crying need to be free."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

"During the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, a nightclub comic observed that, had the demonstrators been served, some of them could not have paid for the meal. Of what advantage is it to the Negro to establish that he can be served in integrated restaurants, or accommodated in integrated hotels, if he is bound to the kind of financial servitude which will not allow him to take a vacation or even to take his wife out to dine? Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public, but they must also be absorbed in our economic system in such a manner that they can afford to exercise that right."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”

“You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” warned Majikthise, “and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. You want to check your legal position, you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?” “That’s right,” shouted Vroomfondel, “we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

The Book of Fathers

The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos

"Perhaps it was a mistake to remain silent about your parents and the others. Once you are better, you must certainly have a talk. You squeezed the past our of you but somehow took the present with it... You didn't notice how you wasted the days and years. Perhaps fate, heaven, God, or sod-all, will make sure your son fares better."

"The longer winter takes a-dying, the more spectacular will be the spring. On the last of the days of bitter cold, the land awakens to the morning chorus of the songbirds, and from the bottom of its heart yearns for the rebirth now approaching. There is not long to wait; soon we shall be welcoming the purest of colors, smells, tastes, forms and combinations, which may yet, in spite of everything, make the world a better place. At times like this it almost seems that nature is trespassing on the territory of art."

What is the What

What is the What by Dave Eggers

"At that moment something in me snapped. I felt it, I could not be mistaken. It was as if there were a handful to taut strings inside me, holding me straight, holding together my brain and heart and legs, and at that moment, one of these strings, thin and delicate, snapped."

"It was the rain that killed many boys. The rain made us frail and brought the insects, and the insects brought malaria. The rain weakened us all. It was very much like what the rain would do to the cattle we would make from clay- under the relentless rain, the clay would soften and give, and soon the clay would not be a cow anymore, but would break apart. The rain did this to the suffering people of Pochalla, especially the boys who had no mothers: they broke under the force of the rain, they melted back into the earth."

"I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency. If ever I love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."