Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

I think it is great when someone is so in touch with some part of their life so much that they can tell the slight differences that make it so special. That is how I am with baseball. I can tell if the pitcher's ball is moving when it shouldn't be or when a player did something that he shouldn't and he should get hit by the next pitch thrown to him because of it. I can't say that I am at the level that Emerson is though when it comes to nature.

All I Really need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum

Share everything.
Play Fair
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.

I think this would be a great way to replace the rules that are set up around the school. People would be able to understand what they mean a lot easier. Our school would be so much different if we could actually follow these rules like we did when we were in kindergarten. I bet I could see every one of those rules, besides flush, broken at lunch every day if I were to go out and look for them. It's a shame that high school kids can't follow the rules set for children more than a decade younger than us.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

"What is the shape of Walnut Bend?"
He might as well have asked my my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives

Mark Twain is very interesting to me because he's kind of got a dry humor. He answers his chiefs question with such a broad answer that it can't be anything but right. It's kind of like when someone comes up to you and asks, " How did you lose that game?" Which you can simply reply, "They scored more than we did." He also does very well describing the actions of his characters. In that last sentence you could tell that the chief was chewing him up one end and down the other just with a simple metaphor.

Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1954 by Ernest Hemingway
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

This is the way I wish I could live my life. No, not anything to do with writing but to never be satisfied. Hemingway is right when he says that you should always reach for something beyond attainment because if you do that odds are you could reach something that you didn't think was actually possible. If you don't try to succeed, you just try not to fail, anything you try and improve on will have reached a never ending plateau.
Soldier's Home by Ernest Hemingway


By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been welcomed elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of hysteria. Now the reaction had set in. People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over.

This goes to show how much really appreciate things. It's easy to love something when everyone else is loving it, but you can show true character if you can show that same kind of love to something when it has gone out of style. I think it's ridiculous that something like this could ever happen, but it happens all the time and you hardly ever see anyone doing anything to change that.
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

"I wanted the ideal animal to hunt," explained the general. "So I said, `What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?' And the answer was, of course, `It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason."'
"But no animal can reason," objected Rainsford.
"My dear fellow," said the general, "there is one that can."
"But you can't mean--" gasped Rainsford.
"And why not?"
"I can't believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke."
"Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting."
"Hunting? Great Guns, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder."
The general laughed with entire good nature. He regarded Rainsford quizzically. "I refuse to believe that so modern and civilized a young man as you seem to be harbors romantic ideas about the value of human life. Surely your experiences in the war--"

This was one of the biggest surprises I ever read about. I couldn't believe it when Zaroff said he was actually hunting human beings. This shows what goes through the minds of people who were given power over weapons they shouldn't have been given. Zaroff reminds me of the suicide bombers of today. They don't realize that they are taking something precious away from this Earth for a stupid cause.

A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather

" I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!
I understood, for her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.

There isn't a worse feeling than experiencing such a great nostalgia and then having it yanked away from you by reality. There's always a point in someone's life where they look back and wish they were still living in the past and that makes the present worse than it was before we looked in to our past. This is a great reason to live in the present.