Topps Unused Slides; Objects and Pursuits

Here’s something you may not know: these unused Topps master slides from 1978-1983 inspired many of our finest authors and works of literature. Proof? Proof:

Richie Zisk

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” -Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

George Hendrick

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” -Sylvia Plath

Ruppert Jones

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tim Blackwell

“That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” -Cormac McCarthy

Randy Martz

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” -David Foster Wallace

Terry Puhl

“The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.” -Margaret Atwood

Greg Luzinski

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

Britt Burns

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.” -Jane Austen

Tito Fuentes

“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.” -Jeffrey Eugenides

Jim Tracy

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” -Kurt Vonnegut

Bake McBride

“Surely, he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo and our one full poet.” -J.D. Salinger

Steve Carlton

“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.” -Marcel Proust

Gary Maddox

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” – Anaïs Nin

Willie McGee

“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing… I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” -Vladimir Nabakov

Bobby Castillo

“You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over.” -William Faulkner

[ H/T to Whiskers On A Stache for alerting me to these amazing photos! ]