... a book about capitalism vs. the climate.

We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can't afford to shop as much as they used to.

—Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, p. 166.

... a poem.

I'm sorry you had to die
To make me sorry
You're not here now.

—Kingsley Amis, "In Memoriam W.R.A.," from A Look Round the Estate.

... a big fat book.

The only serious global social movement, in all of history to date, has been the international labor movement (Marxism), which had one great, enduring, and legitimate strength—and one altogether fatal weakness. The strength was that it discovered a common trait that all humans possess, regardless of race, creed, nationality, or gender: we all have to secure our bodily survival through social labor of one sort or another. We all have to eat. And thus social labor puts us all in the same boat, makes us all world citizens.

Its fatal weakness was that it did not just ground higher cultural endeavors in the economic or material realm, it reduced them to that exchange, reduced them to material productions and material values and material means, with all higher productions, especially spirituality, serving only as the opiate of the masses.

This was such an egregious reduction that Marxism had to be converted into a religious mythology, and had to press its vision in an imperialistic fashion. But it took evolution less than a mere century to begin to erase that mistake in earnest.

—Ken Wilber, 199-200, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 2000.

... a novel.

I kept the revolver in sight, just to remind him that all in the garden was not yet roses.

—Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male.

... an essay's footnote.

(1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind—anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue—your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you're trying to argue for.

Because (1) and (2) seem so simple and obvious, it may surprise you to know that they are actually incredibly hard to get students to understand in such a way that the principles inform their writing. The reason for the difficulty is that, in the abstract, (1) and (2) are intellectual, whereas in practice they are more things of the spirit. The injunctions require of the student both the imagination to conceive of the reader as a separate human being and the empathy to realize that this separate person has preferences and confusions and beliefs of her own just as deserving of respectful consideration as the writer's. These sorts of requirements are, of course, also the elements of a Democratic Spirit. I therefore submit that the hoary cliché "Teaching the student to write is teaching the student to think" sells the enterprise way short. Thinking isn't even half of it.

—David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage," footnote 59, collected in Consider the Lobster.

... a preface.

Man consists of the following properties of Matter; oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium [potassium], natrium [sodium], sulphur, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon, chlorine, fluorine, lithium, manganese, copper, lead. I invite the reader to consider this with all the material forces of his being.

These forms of Matter with their energies, of which the body, mind, and soul of man consist, have always been; they burn in the farthest stars, they are knit up in the texture—thinner than gossamer, than vapour, as im­ponderable as fancy—of the primitive substance, the Ether, which fills the interstellar spaces from moon to sun, from orbit to orbit, from galaxy to galaxy, the exquisite material out of which the nebulae are constringed in beads and drops and clots of Matter upon threads of light­ning, meteors, meteorites, that collide into flame, or by what process soever, to become upon con­densation, concentration, contraction, systems and constellations, suns and planets.

The whole Matter of man, however mutable, is therefore everlasting, has no beginning and will have no end; for Matter is indestructible.

—John Davidson, preface to The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage, 1905.

... a story.

Matthews's life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.

—Robert Stone, "Fun With Problems."

... an article.

Any decent writer sees his first concern as the rendering of what he takes to be permanent in human nature, and this holds true no matter how 'contemporary' his material. Now and again he may feel that there are some political causes too vast or urgent to be subordinated to mere literature, and will allow one or other such to determine the shape of what he writes. But by doing so he will have been guilty of betrayal. He will have accelerated the arrival of the day on which it is generally agreed that a novel or a poem or a play is no more than a system of generalizations orchestrated in terms of plot and diction and situation and the rest; the day, in other words, on which the novel, the poem, and the play cease to exist, and that is the worst prospect of all.

—Kingsley Amis, "Lone Voices," 1960, collected in What Became of Jane Austen?

... a short story.

At that moment experienced a strange elation, as if standing on a dock listening to water lap against piles as I prepared to embark on a longed-for voyage.

—Steven Millhauser, "The Wizard of West Orange."

... a Harper's from 2007, to tell the truth.

If you're going to write a book, who asked you to? It is, in fact, quite an act of ego to sit down in a room, while others are getting on trains and subways, and put one's vision on paper, and then ask others to pay to read it. It's an act of audacity.

—William Gaddis, from an interview by Tom LeClair, conducted in 1980 and included in the essay collection Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System.

To be honest, I feel some of the same audacity when blogging—which is why this blog is composed of other people's work.