Meaningful Quotes and Passages from Books

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“What had Freddy meant, “the bravest person I know”? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”

— Andrew Sean Greer, Less

"And if we accept Bacon's theory of 'secret sympathy,' or the plainer physiological maxim that there must be in the imagination, morbidly impressed by the will of another, some trains of idea in affinity with such influence and preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp you to evil, except through thoughts that themselves went astray. Grant that Margrave who still haunts your mind did really, by some occult, sinister magnetism, guide the madman to murder, did influence the servant-woman's vulgar desire to pry into the secrets of her ill-fated master, or the old maid's covetous wish and envious malignity: what could this awful magician do more than any commonplace guilty adviser, to a mind predisposed to accept the advice?"

-p. 401 in "A Strange Story," from "The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Vol. 2," by Leonaur (C) 2011 Oakpast Ltd.