highlights from my Am Lit reading this semester:

"Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions."
~from Souls Belated by Edith Wharton

"Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State--were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentelmen's society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person?"
(or as Dr. Potter more eloquently put it, Daisy Miller: innocent flirt or brazen hussy?)
~from Daisy Miller: A Study by Henry James

"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?"
~from The Open Boat by Stephen Crane

"'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? ...
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense."
~from "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost

"(Husband) 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'
(Wife) 'I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'"
~from "The Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
~from "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
~from "Birches" by Robert Frost

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. ...
Time for you and time for me,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea, ...
Do I dare
Disturb the universe? ...
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; ...
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid."
~from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
~from "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot