"What I'm certain I don't want, she finally said aloud, is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve. "  --Ada in Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

"They were all English teachers at Lakeland's spanking-new, state-of-the-art high school, but there was no discussion of books, not ideas, nor any mention of the deeper things of life.  As I listened, it became obvious that they team-teach to avoid work, and assign the same books year after year because they've already read them.  Worst of all, as their conversation so clearly betrayed, they show the movie versions of the books they assign, then give test questions their students can answer by having watched the movie alone." -- in Master of the Delta advance reading copy by Thomas H. Cook

"Well, it's on and on I've seen, yeah, that's how it's always been, and how it will be as ever on I go.

Oh, but ever on I will, through all the banal times until I find some place to me that seems like home."

-- song lyrics, "The Crock of Gold," The Tossers