Unattributed Tribulation

From a series of journals recently acquired at an estate sale, and purporting --near as I can tell-- to be the notes for A Choir of Lions: The Untold War. Encompassing Nature, Metamorphosis, Static Coding, and Leisure a Thousand Times Interrupted by Disquiet in Its Myriad Disguises. Complete with Visual Explanations and Appendices on Traveling with Your Pet, Superior Fishing, and Unconventional English, as well as a Comprehensive Glossary for Pool Hustlers, Informed Digressions on Silent Film, Pharmacological Improvisation, the History of Imaginative Astronomy, and Diverse Other Subjects --"A Book, by McGill."

A trio of girls on a canoe adventure [sic]?

With what dissimulation I went to work!

Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? We are in an empire of laws, not of men, but to the best of my knowledge no one has yet to arrive at a satisfactory answer to that first question.

Where is the star of disaster I wished upon?

Every day is the Fourth of July to the slave of shooting stars.

Pull down the evening bars and shoo the flock away.

--But, sir, there is no flock....

Cronus is now well past his prime, but his appetites remain undiminished!

I do not believe there is a means of "infallibly discovering the heart of man."

Not even the heart of the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation?

No. A thousand times no.

Etaoin Shrdlu. Poco Tiempo!

The charm of the show to me is that no one pretends to understand even in a remote degree.

Not matter, but mind. Not things, but men.

Ourselves we worship, and have no son.

The orchestra has arrived. Stop your dancing.

I'm getting ahead of my story.

We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out.

Look, ma, no hands.

[See: Ferdinand LeMothe, pool shark]

I knew what I was doing. I have no regrets and under the same circumstances I would do it again.

Any gum, chum?

All the influences were lined up waiting for me like wolves. I was born, and they were there to devour me.

NO CHAOS DAMN IT!

How much trouble one scoundrel with an abacus and a telephone can cause.

Come sweet hope from thy divine retreat come...

The silence of a purple star lights up a falling sky.

Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country is doing to you.

...the number and complexity of the objects he already knows have absorbed all his strength so that any further progress must be impossible.

But words plainly force and overrule the understanding and throw all into confusion...

Chub.

So many illustrious villains!

We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transport.

This seems to me a very feeble wow.

A father's no shield for his child.

Invisible fence: YES!

Well, bright boy, why don't you say something?

I GIVE YOU THE MAUSOLEUM OF ALL HOPE AND DESIRE!

The ditch is nearer.

Escanaba. The Hiawatha Motel. Dog-friendly Christians.