Compare and contrast

I read two books this summer. The first was a post-apocalyptic vampire story titled, "The Passage" by Justin Cronin. The second was an historical fiction by David Mitchell titled, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet."
Below is text I highlighted from each.

The Passage

". . . you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person."
"How surprising death was, how irrevocable and complete, how much itself."
"What were the living dead, "Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?"
"You took their bad ideas and, for whatever reason, made them your own. That was the truth he'd learned on the carousel with Amy, . . . "
". . . that was how it felt. So many years gone by--the passage of time itself a kind of marvel. . . "
"And it was true: once you knew that the world was a place that swarmed with death, the child you'd been no longer seemed like you at all."
"A baby wasn't an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living."
"This strange new being grew inside you and by the time it was all over, you were someone different, too."
"She made them want to remember. She made them want to die."
". . . foam of voices."

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

". . . and the shuddering newborn boiled-pink despot howls at Life."
"Jacob finds himself as little able to evade the man's gaze as a book can of its own volition, evade the scrutiny of a reader. The silent observer twists his head, like a hunting dog listening to the sound of its prey."
"A he-rat, the young man realizes, mounting his she-rat Listening, he becomes enwrapped by memories of women's bodies."
"He spews out a dragon of phlegm."
"'Loyalty looks simple,' Grote tells him, 'but it ain't.'"
". . . professorships kill philosophers."
". . . she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere."
". . . like a struck tuning fork, Jacob reverberates with the parts and the entirety of Orito, with all the her-ness of her."
"To list and name people, he thinks, is to subjugate them."
". . . even terror can pale into monotony."
"The stream of scholars and sightseers was an antidote to monotony."
"The well-oiled bolt slides home."
"The scarcity of facts leaves holes where rumors breed."
"But an ink brush, she thinks, is a skeleton key for a prisoner's mind."
"His Japanese rendition is streaked with mysticism, but so is the original."
". . . solace."
". . . the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception."
"To implant belief, Orito thinks, is to dominate the believers."
"'Whatever a man is busy with, that is what, or whom he values.'"
"'To a believer in Fate,' replies Shuzai, 'it's not you who is involving me.'"
"The rain's innumerable hooves clatter on the streets and roofs."
"The two men listen to the percussion of dripping water."
"'A story must move,' Master Chimei opines, 'and misfortune is motion. Contentment is inertia.'"
"Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dumpling makers, if somewhat slower."
"Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.'"
"'Better an honest drowning than slow death by hypocrisy, law, or debt.'"
"West to east, the sky unrolls and rolls its atlas of clouds."
"Celibacy is for vegetarians."
"'. . . we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.'"
"'. . . a promise is a promise, even in a myth--especially in a myth.'"
"'The truth of a myth, Your Honor, is not its words but its patterns."
"The world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself."
". . . but perhaps the luckiest are those born from an unthought thought: that the intolerable gulf between lovers can be bridged only by the bones and cartilage of a new being."
"Crows smear rumors across the matted, sticky sky."
"So the stupidest speech I ever heard, he thinks, was the very last."
"A well-waxed paper door slides open."

Guess which one I liked more.