I've been reading lots lately, and not just farming books. Here are two passages that I loved from books I finished this past weekend.
From "Up, Simba," a David Foster Wallace essay that appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays about the 2000 McCain campaign:
"The fact of the matter is that if you're a true-blue, market-savvy Young Voter, the only thing that you're certain to feel about John McCain's campaign is a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen."
From Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment where everything was possible. And there will be a moment where nothing is possible. But in between we can create."