The electrified generation

"Sometimes we wondered what it would have been like to be part of the generation of Americans who discovered Paris in the twenties and remade the world from the Left Bank. Had they felt as we felt? They were younger, some of them were greatly gifted, some of them were infected with fashionable literary despair, most of them were theatrically pleasure-bent. We thought them luckier. They had had only a war to damage them, and war's damage is, when it isn't fatal, likely to be stimulating rather than the reverse. Living through a war, you have lived through drama and excitement. Living through what we had been given to live through, we had only bad luck or personal inadequacy to blame for our shortcomings."

(Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety)

Talent, luck, fate

"I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something -- forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations are too many. Something."

(Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety)

Okay, so this one's not actually from a book

"The technology is not responsible for our woes -- it is neither good nor bad. Mississippi state legislator Noah Sweat's famous 1952 'if when you say whiskey' speech comes to mind: 'If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge...that defiles innocence, dethrones reason...if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it. But, if you when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine...if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies...if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.'

If by automation you mean the soulless fiend that takes jobs away from earnest hard-working Americans, the myopic mechanical monster that robs us of the opportunity to use our hands and our minds in the service of exercising agency in the world; if you mean that collection of integrated circuits that amorally moves electrons from one chip to another without regard for the hopes and dreams and lives it may be crushing in the process, then certainly I am against it.

But if when you say automation you mean the time-saving device that allows a loving couple to spend more time together while the dishes and clothes are restored to their store-bought new condition; if you mean the intelligent, vigilant and benevolent robots that prevent the brakes on our cars from locking in the ice, causing an irreversible skid and resultant loss of life or limb; if you mean the marvelous multi-national manufacturing machines that make the drugs that a child with leukemia needs in order to live a healthy, full and productive life, then certainly I am for it."

(Daniel J. Levitin, "Learning to Roomba", in The Wall Street Journal, October 11-12, 2014, p. C7)