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1 " A book a week I heave a sigh;That Slogan's peremptory cryI will not hear, I will not heed.How can They say that I should needThe book They bid me weekly buy?But Slogans change, as days go by;My Psyche listens, fluttering shy,To newer message " Come and ReadA book a week." To read! to read! O wings that flyO'er sun-kissed lands, through clouded skyThat bear us on where Great ones lead!I too must follow, so I pleadFor magic wings. I'll read (or try)A book a week! "
2 " Possession of the box conferred a kind of power on the wielder--which was that anyone, confronted with the hypnotic glass eye, would submissively obey the most peremptory orders about stance and expression. "
― Terry Pratchett , The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind, #1)
3 " All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated. "
― Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
4 " My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others. "
― Susan Choi , My Education
5 " There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. "
― George Eliot , The Mill on the Floss
