... the internet.

Rare Images of Angelina Jolie Being Auctioned Off.

—The internet. Ha, ha, ha.

... a ghost story.

"I love you," he says, crossing his fingers.

—Fay Weldon, "Watching Me, Watching You," from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Cox.

... a great essay.

We often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains.

There is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to a well-ordered and pious mind? A man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardor and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal.

A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose.

I have known some people driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out. "But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow creature out of an Alpine crevasse. Imagine that you are engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English."

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

—G. K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat," in All Things Considered, 1908.

... a novel.

"Take my advice, mister—" He stopped. To devise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge? His embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie's face, clamped there by the promise of advice.

"Yes, sergeant," said Wylie, and held his breath.

—Samuel Beckett, Murphy, chapter 4.

... a letter to the editors.

We live today in a world in which oligopolies (a few giant corporations which control the majority of the market) raise prices in good times and bad, prefer large per-item profits on a low volume of sales to smaller unit profits on many more sales, and shift the social costs of pollution, ecological disaster, poverty, unemployment, aging, and disability to everyone else—anyone else—in the name of "liberty."

This isn't liberty. It's piracy. Private piracy.

The liberty of the marketplace is, and historically has been, an excuse for the worst kind of vampirism. Despite the enormous inequities between men sanctioned by this version of "liberty," the inequities between men and women are worse: globally, women do two-thirds of the world's work and receive 10 percent of the world's pay.

—Joanna Russ, letter to The Women's Review of Books, March 1986. Collected in The Country You Have Never Seen.

... the history of England.

Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing-press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, Volume 1, Chapter III.