quotations

Very good. The first three were quoted by Jon Krakauer in *Into Thin Air*. The last is from *The Algebra of Infinite Justice*.

"The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities." -- A. Alvarez, *The Savage God: A Study of Suicide*

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live ...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -- Joan Didion, *The White Album*

"I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event." -- Harold Brodkey, "Manipulations"

"The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable." -- Arundhati Roy