Fifteen Men On The Dead Man's Chest

"Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

Treasure Island, 1883
Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894)

One of my favorite childhood books!

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

"And even though I testify about the terrible human state, and its rescue by the sanctity of Jesus, what, what, what in this annus dominus are we brought to, we the laborers, the artisans, the cooks of linseed stew?" The Master throws his brush across the room. "They want flowers, flowers for commerce, beauty to sell as if it had its own sake! Why don't the dreamless Calvinists just go off to Constantinople? Why don't they join the pagan Mohammedans who rebuke the notion of portraying divinity in anything but Euclidean tiles of blue and gold? Or why don't I just take myself to the Spanish Netherlands and set myself up there? Where I can paint what I want, and keep food on the table as well?"

....

"Another maiden in the house" says the Prince, and then looking back at Iris, remembering, "your stepsister, the one who minds the hearth"
Iris nods.
"Let her try the slipper" say Margarethe wildly, perhaps to shift the attention of the Prince from the sniffles of Ruth.
"There is no need; the slipper was merely a ruse to get you to open the door to me" says the Prince. "A ruse, I see, that I did not even need to enact." But Clara has come forward and taken the slipper from where it was fallen.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, 1999
Gregory Maguire (1954 - )

A Bend In The River

I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh, and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really quite a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren't put in our way we could master it. It didn't matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the doers and the makers. It didn't matter that we couldn't make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of primitive people. If fact, the less educated we were, the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.

For Ferdinand there was no such possibility. He could never be simple. The more he tried, the more confused he became. His mind wasn't empty, as I had begun to think. It was a jumble, full of all kinds of junk.

A Bend In The River, 1979
V. S. Naipaul (1932- )

Moby Dick

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Moby Dick (1851)
Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)

India: From Midnight to the Millennium

"India," Winston Churchill once barked, "is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, "by strong but invisible threads.... About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive."

India: From Midnight to the Millennium, 1997
Shashi Tharoor (1956 - )

The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."


A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870)