3 books and 3 quotes

I realized that I'm currently reading three books: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and now thanks to Anne The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I am enjoying all three, however, this is a little ridiculous- ah well, I'll just have to plow through them all!

Quote1: from Laughter and Forgetting- I read this while getting new tires on my car:

"I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea." -Milan Kundera

Quote2: from The Illuminatus!-
"Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. 'Objectivists?' he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. 'We're anarchists and outlaws, goddamn it. Didn't you understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.' ... '"I will not serve,"'" -Shea and Wilson.

Quote3: from The Omnivore's Dilemma-
"The biological absurdity, characteristic of all CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation], is compounded in the cattle feed yard by a second absurdity. Here animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass must be adapted by us- at considerable cost to their heatlth, to the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters- to live on corn, for no other reason than it offers the chapest calories around and because the great pile must be consumed. This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than, say, a chicken or a pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain: The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over logic of evolution." -Michael Pollan