... a French novel very slowly.

The Public Prosecutor and his Deputies, worn out with fatigue, feverish with brandy and lack of sleep, could only shake off their exhaustion with a violent effort; and their shattered health made them tragic figures.

—Anatole France, The Gods are Thirsty.

... the Tao Te Ching adapted for a new age.

When a person forgets that all creation is a unity, allegiance goes to lesser wholes, such as the family, the home team, or the company.

As consciousness of unity is lost, nationalism, racism, classism, and sexism arise. People take sides, and favor this versus that.

—John Heider, The Tao of Leadership, p. 35

... a French novel very slowly.

Amid the stream of citizens that flowed past the shop, it was the most ragged who loitered longest before the two beautiful windows, eager for distraction, hungry for images, and wanting to take their share, if only by eye, of the good things in life; they stood in open-mouthed admiration, while the aristocrats merely glanced, frowned, and passed on.

—Anatole France, The Gods are Thirsty, Chapter 3.

... a divertimento.

We all talk about the history of literature, but what, concretely, is the history of literature in the common memory? A patchwork of fragmentary images that, by pure chance, each of thousands of readers has stitched together for himself. Beneath the hole-ridden sky of such a vaporous, illusory memory, we are all at the mercy of blacklists, of their arbitrary, untestable verdicts, and always ready to ape their stupid elegance.

—Milan Kundera, "Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France," in Encounter.

... a short story.

During many years of married life he had forgotten what sex was really about.

—Richard Brautigan, "Wild Birds of Heaven," from Revenge of the Lawn.

... a #1 national bestseller.

An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines. Our common addiction to dirty, non-renewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters and wars waged for control over scarce resources, which in turn create terrorist blowback.

Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.

—Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 513.

... a sentence in a novel.

Dr Vaisey had put his cake in some danger without so much as having nibbled at it.

—Kingsley Amis, The Russian Girl, p. 51.