"When he was trying to get his patent, I took him up to Long Beach and introduced him to a good lawyer name of Welch. Rod had an interest in a denture factory in Tijuana and he was trying to get a U.S. patent on their El Tigre model. They were wonderful teeth. They had two extra canines and two extra incisors of tungsten steel. Slap a set of those Tiger plates in your mouth and you can throw your oatmeal out the window. You could shred an elk steak with those boogers."

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

"You see," he said, "the idea of making things that don't spoil is to make them dead to start with, so they don't need to ever die. there's dead metal, that's angel silver, that won't rust or pit or tarnish; and dead cloths like this; and plastics like dead wood that won't dry-rot or get wormy or split. And strangest of all; the angels could make dead food. Food that never gets stale, never rots, never spoils. I eat it."

"I have food like that. I smoke it."

"No, no! Not that evil pink stuff! I mean food, food you eat. Look here." He stood on tiptoe and took down from a high shelf a closed pot of metal, with a dull plastic glow about it. "Metal," he said, "that won't rust, and a jacket of plastic over that. Now watch and listen." There was a ring attached to the top, and Teeplee worked his finger under it and pulled. I expected the ring to come off, but instead there was a hiss like an indrawn breath and the whole top came off in a graceful spiral. "Look," he said, and showed me what was inside: it looked like sawdust, or small chips of wood. "Potato," he said. "Not now, I mean, not just yet; but mix this with water, and you'd be surprised: a mashed-up potato is just what it is, and as good as new."

"As good as new? What does it taste like?"

"Well. Dead. But like food. Throw it in water and you've got something like a mashed-up potato that the angels made, boy, a potato that's a thousand years old." He looked reverently within the pot and shook the stuff; it made a dry, sandy sound. Now even a rock, he said, even a mountain changes in a thousand years. But the angels could make this potato that's dead to begin with, so it couldn't change. They could make a potato that's immortal."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

One day as [Isaac Newton] walked in his garden and noticed fruit falling from a tree he drifted off into deep meditation on that problem of gravity, of which all the philosophers have so long vainly sought the cause, and in which the vulgar find nothing the slightest bit mysterious.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

When he had put his greater affairs in order, the new Pope called for me, and let me know he wished no one but me to make his money. Whereupon one of his most intimate friends, Latino Juvenale by name, spoke to his Holiness, and said I was in hiding for a homicide committed on the person of one Pompeo, a Milanese; and then he added all that could be said in my favour. To which the Pope replied, "I did not know of Pompeo's death; but well I know of Benvenuto's excuse. So make out a safe-conduct for him, that he may rest perfectly secure." Now there stood by a great friend of Pompeo, a man very intimate with the Pope, Messer Ambroglio of Milan, an he spoke thus, "In the first days of your reign it is not wise to grant favours of this sort." But his Holiness replied, I know better about such things than you. Learn that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, are not subject to their laws."

—Benvenuto Cellini, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini

The first intercity trip of Benz's three-wheeler took place two years later, in August 1888. Benz's wife Bertha took the couple's two sons and, without her husband's knowledge, drove the three-wheeler from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother, a distance of about 100 km.

—Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century

You omnipotent good, you care for every one of us as if you cared only for that person, and so for all as if they were but one!

—Augustine, Confessions

Colonel Frederick Ponsonby had been cut up by French cavalry sabers and left for dead; he had been speared by a passing Polish lancer; given some brandy by a French officer; piled into a barricade of bodies by retreating French infantry; ridden over and tossed by Prussian cavalry; discovered by a British infantryman who stood guard over him throughout the night, while he felt the air pass in and out of his pierced lung; and finally taken off to a dressing-station at daybreak. He was known as “The Man Who Was Killed at Waterloo,” and spotted twelve years later, as governor of Malta, by Captain Codrington’s daughter, who found him “playing violent games of racquets with as much energy as the young soldiers around him.”
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830