It is not by accident that choirs singing psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.
– Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves
Nothing in the world is larger than the tip of a hair in autumn, and Mount Tai is small. No one lives longer than a dead child, and old Pengzu died an early death. Heaven and earth are born together with me, and the ten thousand things and I are one.
– Zhuangzi
So don’t talk to me of miners, Martha… the sacrifice of doctors, the beatings pugilists receive, or the personal poundings politicians get; not when I’ve lived my life at a desk, here or there among nailed-down chairs… for I have a black lung, too, a bent nose, a tarnished reputation, an abandoned wife (that’s you, my dear); and I have spent so much of my time in the study, settled as a lesson plan… that I’ve passed whole days on my ass in the posture of the constipated or the guru; weeks, months, seasons, semesters, years, sluggish as a python; and consequently led – just like the books I’ve written, read and taught – a small, square, solid, six-buck, clothbound, print and paper-jacket life.
– William Gass, The Tunnel
Dr Urbino was reluctant to confess his hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of scientific inventions and philosophical pretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they were complicit in the three denials of Christ.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Fruit Thief 