"Sala grumbled and drank his beer. I liked him, in spite of his bitching. I guessed he was a few years older than  I was, maybe thirty-two or -three, but there was something about him that made me feel like I'd known him a long time.

 Yeamon was familiar too, but not quite as close - more like a memory of somebody I'd known in some other place and then lost track of. He was probably twenty-four or -five and he reminded me vaguely of myself at that age - not exactly the way I was, but the way I might have seen myself if I'd stopped to think about it. Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.

 I hadn't felt that way in a long time. Perhaps, in the ambush of those years, the idea that I was a champion had been shot out from under me. But I remembered it now and it made me feel old and slightly nervous that I had done so little in so long a time.

 I leaned back in the chair and sipped my drink. The cook was banging around in the kitchen and for some reason the piano had stopped. From inside came a babble of Spanish, an incoherent background for my scrambled thoughts. For the first time  I felt the foreignness of the place, the real distance I had put between me and my last foothold. There was no reason to feel pressure, but I felt it anyway - the pressure of hot air and passing time, an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day."

The Rum Diary
By Hunter S. Thompson

"Ed Dunkel, his compassion unnoticed like the compassion of saints. Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginingless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance. "Good-by, good-by." Dean walked off in the long red dusk. Locomotives smoked and reeled above him. His shadow followed him, it aped his walk and thoughts and very being. He turned and waved coyly, bashfully. He have me the boomer's highball, he jumped up and down, he yelled something I didn't catch. He ran around in a circle. All the time he came closer to the concrete corner of the railroad overpass. He made one last signal. I waved back. Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight. I gaped into the bleakness of my own days. I had an awful long way to go too."

On The Road
by Jack Kerouac

 "We Americans deeply believe that our role in the world is virtuous - that our actions are almost invariable for the good of others as well as ourselves. Even when our country's actions have led to disaster, we assume that the motives behind them were honorable. But the evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.

... In November 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton announced that he would make it his policy "to reduce the proliferation of weapons of destruction in the hands of people who might use them in very destructive ways. In February 1995, president Clinton released his new arms export policies. They renewed old Cold War policies even though the Cold War had clearly ended, but they emphasized the commercial advantages of foreign arms sales. According to the Clinton White House, the United States' arms export policies are intended to deter aggression: "promote peaceful conflict resolution and arms control, human rights, and democratization" increase "interoperability" of the equipment of American and allied armies; prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles; and "enhance the ability of the U.S. defense industrial base to meet U.S. defense requirements and maintain long-term military technological superiority at lower costs." One of the arms industry's chief lobbyists commented, "It's the most positive statements on defense trade that has been enunciated by any administration." But despite the doublethink language of the White House, there are certain essential contradictions in arms sales policy that cannot be papered over. The Pentagon's global industrial policy, which keeps it corporate support system in place and well funded, regularly overrides more traditional foreign policy concerns, creates many potential long-term problems that may, in the end, prove beyond all solution. Arms sales are, in short, a major cause of a developing blowback world whose price we have yet to begin to pay."

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
By Chalmers Johnson

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say women, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits stares. He's nineteen years old - it's too much for him.- so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Listen to Rat: "Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back."

The Things They Carried
By Tim O'Brien

"It's a book," I said. "It's a book what you are writing." I made the old goloss very coarse. "I have always had the strongest admiration for them as can write books." Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name - A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - and I said. "That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?" Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: "-- The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen--" Dim made the old lip-music at that and I had to smeck myself. Then I started to tear up the sheets and scatter the bits over the floor, and this writer moodge went sort of bezoomny and made for me with his zoobies clenched and showing yellow and his nails ready for me like claws. So that was old Dim's cue and he went grinning and going er er and a a a for this veck's dithering rot, crack crack, first left fistie then right, so that our dear old droog the red - red vino on tap and the same in all places, like it's put out by the same big firm - started pour and spot the nice clean carpet and the bits of this book that I was still ripping away at, razrez razrez.

A Clockwork Orange
By Anthony Burgess

"Vistos desde lejos, producían un efecto esplendido. Los movimientos de este ejercito estaban regulados como los de un verdadero ballet. Primero, entraban a escena los faroleros de Nueva Zelanda y de Australia. Una vez que encendían sus lámparas, se iban a dormir. Entonces les tocaba a los faroleros de China y de Siberia. Después, ellos también se escurrían tras bambalinas. Enseguida era el turno de los faroleros de Rusia y de India. A continuación, los de Africa y Europa. Luego, los de América del Sur. Y finalmente, los de América del Norte. Y jamás se equivocaban en el orden de entrada a escena. Era grandioso. . .

. . . Observen con atención este paisaje, para estar seguros de reconocerlo si algún día viajan al desierto de África. Y, si por casualidad pasaran por allá, les suplico que no se apresuren: deténganse un poco bajo esa estrella! Y si sucede que un niño viene hacia ustedes, si ríe, si tiene cabellos dorados y no responde cuando se le pregunta, sabrán de quien se rata. Entonces, sean buenos, no me dejen con este tristeza! Escríbanme rápido para decirme que ha regresado. . . "

El Principito
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"Antes del accidente se podría decir que mi existencia era bastante normal. Vivía con mi familia, pololeaba y estudiaba la carrera que había escogido. Mis máximas preocupaciones eran la prueba de la próxima semana o tonteras así. Tenia muchos planes, era feliz. Es increíble como de pronto, en un segundo, todo cambia. Los noticieros muestran tragedias horribles y, aunque nos afectan, nunca pensamos que nos pueden ocurrir a nosotros. Por que creeremos que somos una especie de seres invulnerables?

Mi vida ahora es muy distinta. Muy diferente a lo que hubiese imaginado para mi. Pero he aprendido algo muy importante: no porque sea distinta significa que sea mala. No porque en nuestra vida acontezca algo terrible significa que en nuestro futuro no volverán a haber alegrías."

Elegí Vivir (I chose to live)
Daniela Garcia

[ a book written by a 24 year old Chilean woman who lost both arms and legs when she fell through the floor of a train when passing between cars. The book chronicles her recovery and rehabilitation ]