Yes, I said Harry Potter (vol. 5):
“I didn’t know what I was doing half the time, I didn’t plan any of it, I just did whatever I could think of, and I nearly always had help”
“War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
From White Noise
The full quote, if you’re interested:
“Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
From Sam Walker’s Fantasyland:
Rotisserie baseball may be the most ridiculous duplication of effort in the history of human affairs, but that’s hardly a concern. For the next four days our universe begins with Paul Abbott and ends with Alec Zumwalt.
By Paul Theroux, in a New Yorker article about the (completely insane) former dictator of Turkmenistan:
Turkmenbashi’s acolytes had recently pronounced him the “national prophet,” a harmless enough conceit if you’re a civilian, but a pathological, if not fatal, one in a despot. Turkmenbashi had written a sort of national Bible, called “Ruhnama” (“Book of the Soul”), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer—a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Bryan Joiner 