quotes at random, no. 43 - somewhat close to home

Instead, the Suez crew hang out in the Suez crew cabin on A Deck for 18 hours, eating, sleeping, listening to Egyptian pop music, and trying to sell souvenirs. They all have the corpulence of the well-off in a poor country. They disembark at the canal's southern port, climbing into a small boat hitched to our side, then refusing to untether it for several miles, as if they didn't even have the energy to use their own motor.

He swears that he used to see meat stamped with "For Merchant Navy only."

The fabric he used for the cupboards belonged to a rural Chinese family in the early 1900s; at the time, every family in the region had its own specific fabric design, similar to the clan-specific tartan fabrics in Scotland.

“The idea that you manage the local bureaucracy by sicking the masses on them is actually not a democratic tradition but a Maoist tradition,” she told me. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged citizens to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt, and human-flesh searches have been tagged by some as Red Guard 2.0.

When I work with my scanner and there's someone else shopping near me who wants to read books, I feel that my energy is all wrong—high-pitched, focused narrowly in the present, and jealous. Someone browsing through books does it with a diffuse, forgetful curiosity, a kind of open reckoning that she learned from reading. ("Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman" /  Michael Savitz)

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