Girl, Interrupted

"It was my misfortune - or salvation - to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality... This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled."

Girl, Interrupted, p. 41-42

By Susanna Kaysen

Published 1993

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"I've heard that theory of the Therapeutic Community enough times to repeat it forwards and backwards - how a guy has to learn to get along in a group before he'll be able to function in a normal society; how the group can help the guy by showing him where he's out of place; how society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up. All that stuff." 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, p. 44

By Ken Kesey

Published 1962

J.D. Salinger: A Life

"When Salinger lived in Connecticut, unabashed Americanism and materialism were unquestioned values. His neighbors pursued those values religiously and weighed one another against a standard of conformity that often suffocated individuality. Salinger found such material irresistible. Having long exposed the phoniness of society, he now found himself living in a culture that not only esteemed this quality he so despised but also sought to infect all of its members with it."

J.D. Salinger: A Life, pp. 168-169

By Kenneth Slawenski 

Published 2011

The View from Saturday

"I am a passenger on Spaceship Earth." 

The View from Saturday, p. 73
By E. L. Konigsburg
Published 1996

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 
"When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 103
By Milan Kundera
Published 1984

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

"I was a child of atheists, but I had an intuition of God. The days seemed created for our worship. There was grass and flowers and clouds. And then there were the words for these things: mare's tails and a mackerel sky, daylillies and lady's slippers and lilicas and hyacinth. There were words even for the weeds: goldenrod and ragweed and Queen Anne's lace. You could feed yourself on the grandeur of the sounds."

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, p. 2

By Meghan O'Rourke 

Published 2012

The Abstinence Teacher

"I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them." 

The Abstinence Teacher, p. 264
By Tom Perrotta
Published 2007