Three Key Quotes

The fol­low­ing is an excerpt from What I Talk About When I Talk About Run­ning by Haruki Murakami:
Once, I was lying around a hotel room in Paris read­ing the Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune when I came across a spe­cial arti­cle on the marathon. There were inter­views with sev­eral famous marathon run­ners, and they were asked what …

The fol­low­ing is from the adver­tise­ment Elsie Poncher put on eBay sell­ing her husband’s bur­ial plot above Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s.
“Here is a once in a life­time and into eter­nity oppor­tu­nity to spend your eter­nal days directly above Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe,” says the adver­tise­ment.
“In fact the per­son occu­py­ing the address right now is look­ing face down on her.”
If you …

The fol­low­ing excerpts come from William Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations: Civ­i­liza­tions and the Furies of Nation­al­ism. His work, which you can find at williampfaff.com, is essen­tial read­ing in for­eign pol­icy thought for the lay polit­i­cal thinker.

The char­ac­ter of the Byzan­tine employ­ment of power across the many “nations” of the empire made the for­tunes, inter­ests, …

The sec­re­tary had come in, famil­iarly def­er­en­tial, and with that cer­tain mod­est aware­ness, com­mon to all sec­re­taries, of supe­ri­or­ity to their supe­ri­ors in their knowl­edge of affairs, came over to Oblon­sky with some papers and, in the form of a ques­tion, began explain­ing some dif­fi­culty. Oblon­sky did not let …