LISTENING carefully, detaching his mind from the swing of the sea, Ralph could make out a familiar rhythm. ''Kill the beats! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!'' The tribe was dancing. Somewhere on the other side of this rocky wall there would be a dark circle, a glowing fire, and meat. They would be savouring food and the comfort of safety. A noise nearer at hand made him quiver. Savages were clambering up the Castle Rock, right up to the top, and he could hear voices. He sneaked forward a few yards and saw the shape of the top of the rock change and enlarge. There were only two boys on the island who moved or talked like that. Ralph put his head down on his forearms and accepted this new fact like a wound. Samneric were part of the tribe now. They were guarding the Castle Rock against him. There was no chance rescuing them and building up an outlaw tribe at the other end of the island. Samneric were savages like the rest; Piggy was dead, and the conch smashed to powder. - Lord Of The Flies, William Golding -

THE first thing to see, looking  away over the water, was a kind of dull line – that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away - trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks – rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which  you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in the swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being  a woodyard, likely, and piled up by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it ...

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It isn’t just Wally Campbell. I’m just picking on him because you mentioned him. And because he just looks like somebody that spent the summer in Italy or someplace.’ ‘He was in France last summer, for your information,’ Lane stated. ‘I know what you mean,’he added quickly, ‘but you’re being goddam un-‘ ‘All right,’ Franny said wearily. ‘France.’ She took a cigarette out of the pack on the table. ‘It isn’t just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness’ sake. I mean if he were a girl – somebody in my dorm, for example - he’d have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertisement company. It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so – I don’t know – not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemain or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.’ -J. D. Sallinger, Franny and Zooey-

THE mailman scooted up on a red Supercub and distributed the mail to the boxes at the entrance of the building. Some boxes received tons of mail, others hardly anything at all. The mailman didn’t touch my box. He didn’t even look at it. Beside the mailboxes was a potted rubber plant, the ceramic container littered with popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. The rubber plant looked as worn out as I felt. Seemed like every passerby had heaped abuse on the poor thing. I didn’t know how long it’d been sitting there. I must have walked by it every day, but until I got knifed in the gut, I never noticed it was there. -Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World-

ON a moonless night, in the starkness of the locker room at Xclusive, after working out for two hours, I’m feeling good. The gun in my locker is an Uzi which cost me seven hundred dollars and though I’m also carrying a Ruger Mini ($469) in my Botega Veneta briefcase and it’s favored by hunters, I still don’t like the way it looks; there is something more manly about an Uzi, something dramatic about it gets me excited, and sitting there, Walkman on my head, in a pair of two-hundred-dollar black Lycra bicycle shorts, a Valium just beginning to take effect, I stare into the darkness of the locker, tempted.

AS he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall in the snow, the spittle crackled. He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below- how much colder he did not know. -Jack London, To Build A Fire-