The Problems Of Today's Youth were no longer a Sunday supplement or a news broadcast or anything so remote and intangible, they were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood he was not only tired of loving, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes, for recreation.

If the anguish of writing is not and must not be a determined pathos, it is because this anguish is not an empirical modification or state of the writer, but is there responsible of angustia: the necessarily restricted passageway of speech against which all possible meanings push each other, preventing each other's emergence.

"Jee haan, but they are the same! One hunts, one runs, one chews the carrot, one chews the Sir John Hurt. One makes eggs that go BANG! One makes Acme traps that go BANG! See? Sameful. Only Mr. Loony of the Tunes is more actual, on account of how aliens live in your big Danesh-head and bunny rabbits live in Coventry."

"As the little red droid powered down, he wondered what it might be like to have bright lights and a sleek casing and a head swivel that could rotate without pain. To have someone to talk to."

?

"I never drank again. I sold all my coke."
"You sold it? Most people just flush it."
"I'm a business man."
"Understood."

Starting out taking no prisoners with the quote! Ok!

When you find something Stephen King definitely referenced in the book you just read (It).

"That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other."

"It has made a great self-discovery: It did not want change or surprise. It did not want new things, ever. It wanted only to eat and sleep and dream and eat again."

Same.

"Driving north along Storrow Drive, ... Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city's age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn."

There are some men who talk all the time about their horses. This is a steady mount but I used to have one speedier; that's a fine filly you have there, but you should see this bay I have my eyes on. With Henry, it's ladies: he finds something to like in almost any female who crossed his path, and will scratch up a compliment for her, though she be plain and old and sour.

The words to describe it, I realized, with uneasy surprise, came from Lovecraft: a mephitic blast, or a nameless stench: words that have no particular power to terrify, until you find yourself in the presence of the thing to which they refer. Until you discover that there is a thing to which they refer.

"-- Or how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn't give him power."

Some light reading today.

"Psychopath's not a narrow term anymore," I said carefully. "I've heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It's even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction."

"The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here-- it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin..."

'"Twelve fifty?" I said.

The one in the leather jacket shrugged. He was still staying at the floor.

"Why not?" he said.

"Why not?" I said. "For chrissake, think how I feel. Some guy thinks I'm only worth twelve fifty to whack? What kind of thing is that to learn about yourself."'

Disturbingly timely! Kind of loved the ambiguous ending here, but thought the meta discussion of it in the afterword to be a bit... Twee.

"There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with."

"Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or."

A nice relaxing start to 2017 with The Handmaid's Tale. What could be better?