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To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night
and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest
battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting. -- E. E. Cummings

Umberto Eco, Caitlin Kiernan, Michael Ondaatje, William Gibson, Thomas Harris, Michael Crichton, James Lee Burke, Howard Lovecraft, Andrew Vachss (wait, wait, I'm thinking...)Peter Hoeg, John Le Carre, Len Deighton, Adam Hall, Robert Littell

"I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe." Richard Gere, to The Guardian (UK), June 2002

from 'Running Back the Cat' by Robert Litell:
...The old Apache opened his eyes and raised his chin. "Us Apaches," he went on, cutting off Finn's question before he could ask it, "don't believe the world will last forever. We say that the rocks and the mountains will be around a long time, but even they will disappear. And when they have all gone - the rocks and the mountains and us Apaches and even the white man - what will be left?"
Eskeltsetle offered Finn a turn at the cigarette. "What will be left," he said softly, "are our deeds."

People won't let you live the way you want to, but if you're smart enough, and fast enough, at least you don't have to live the way they want you to.
---Andrew Vachss

A professional is someone who believes that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing correctly. An amateur is someone who believes if something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly. - Robert Littell, The Amateur

Alice laughed. "There's no use in trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

from "Poems, partly of rural life, in national English" by William Barnes
'A Winter Night.'

It was a chilly winter's night;
And frost was glitt'ring on the ground,
And evening stars were twinkling bright;
And from the gloomy plain around
Came no sound,
But where, within the wood-girt tow'r,
The churchbell slowly struck the hour;

As if that all of human birth
Had risen to the final day,
And soaring from the wornout earth
Were called in hurry and dismay,
Far away;
And I alone of all mankind
Were left in loneliness behind.

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