Suddenly, fifteen minutes after the prince left, Aglaya came running down to the terrace from upstairs, and in such a hurry that she did not even wipe her eyes, which were wet with tears. She came running down because Kolya arrived and brought a hedgehog. They all started looking at the hedgehog; to their questions, Kolya explained that the hedgehog was not his, and that he was now walking with his comrade, another schoolboy, Kostya Lebedev, who had stayed outside and was embarrassed to come in because he was carrying an axe; that they had bought both the hedgehog and the axe from a peasant they had met. The peasant was selling the hedgehog and took fifty kopecks for it, and then they persuaded him to sell the axe as well, because it was an opportunity, and also a very good axe. Here Aglaya suddenly began pestering Kolya terribly to sell her the hedgehog at once, turned inside out, even called Kolya "dear." Kolya would not agree for a long time, but finally gave in and called Kostya Lebedev, who indeed came in carrying the axe and feeling very embarrassed. But here it suddenly turned out that the hedgehog did not belong to them at all, but to t third boy, Petrov, who had given them money to buy Schlosser's History from some fourth boy, who, being in need of money, was selling it at a bargain price; that they set out to buy Schlosser's History, but could not help themselves and bought the hedgehog, and therefore both the hedgehog and the axe belonged to that third boy, to whom they were now taking them in place of Schlosser's History. But Aglaya pestered them so much that they finally decided to sell her the hedgehog. As soon as Aglaya got the hedgehog, she put it into a wicker basket with Kolya's help, covered it with a napkin, and started asking Kolya to go at once and, without stopping anywhere, take the hedgehog to the prince on her behalf, with the request that he accept it as "a token of her profoundest respect." Kolya gladly agreed and promised to deliver it, but immediately began to pester her: "What was the meaning of the hedgehog and of such a present?" Aglaya replied that that was none of his business. He replied that he was sure it contained some allegory. Aglaya became angry and snapped at him that he was a little brat and nothing more. Kolya at once retorted that if it were not for his respect for the woman in her, and for his own convictions on top of it, he would immediately prove to her that he knew how to respond to such insults. It ended, however, with Kolya delightedly going all the same to deliver the hedgehog, and Kostya Lebedev running after him; Aglaya could not help herself and , seeing Kolya swinging the basket too hard, shouted behind him from the terrace: "Please, Kolya dearest, don't drop it!"—as if she had not just quarreled with him; Kolya stopped and, also as if he had not just been quarreling, shouted with great readiness: "No, I won't drop it, Aglaya Ivanova. Be completely assured!" and ran on at breakneck speed. After that Aglaya laughed terribly and ran to her room extremely pleased, and then was very cheerful all day.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

"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

He said he knew a woman in Sedalia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.

—Charles Portis, True Grit

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

In a country so vast and so ancient as India you can find in some place or some period or other almost anything you like.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

A man, the wise have always insisted, should look with reverence but not with wonder on himself. Rousseau boasts that if not better than other men, he is at least different. By this gloating sense of his own otherwiseness he may be said to have set the tone for a whole epoch. Chateaubriand, for instance, is quite overcome by his own uniqueness and wonderfulness. At the most ordinary happenings he exclaims, as Sainte-Beuve points out, that such things happen only to him. Hugo again is positively stupefied at the immensity of his own genius. The theatricality that one feels in so much of the art of this period arises from the eagerness of the genius to communicate to others something of the amazement that he feels at himself.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

From the time of his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1676, his library was freely used by neighbors and friends. One of these, Jonathan Brewster, read so many books on alchemy that his mind became muddled.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

Clem wrote back to her and received a second letter so long she'd put three stamps on the envelope. It began with questions, devolved into stream of consciousness, short on punctuation, devoid of capital letters, and ended with a passage from Camus she'd copied out in French.

—Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

The year before that, elsewhere in the pines, one man alone set sixty-nine fires. He was, at the time, a policeman in a town on the edge of the woods. After his actions became known, he was described by surprised neighbors as "a good family man" and "a nice guy." He himself "discovered" and reported all sixty-nine fires, usually calling them in on the police radio, and when he had been placed under arrest he couldn't explain why he had felt compelled to set the woods ablaze.

—John McPhee, The Pine Barrens

I heard old Cracky Wainwright say he seen two black snakes come together, and they was both mad. He seen they was going to fight, so he stood and watched them. The one got ahold of the other one's tail and began to swallow it. And the other one got ahold of the other one's tail and began to swallow him. He said they kept on fighting and swallowing one another until both snakes was swallowed. There wasn't any snake left there at all.

—Charles Grant, quoted in John McPhee, The Pine Barrens

If they were fortunate enough to live in a natural-gas boomtown like Muncie in the 1890s, where it was thought that the supply of the stuff was inexhaustible, subscribers had only to pay for the installation of the fixture; there was no attempt to meter the gas and charge for the amount used. it was considered cheaper to have the gas on all the time - opening windows and doors when it became too hot - than to waste a match relighting it.

---Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: a Narrative History

One of the competing schools of electricians took electricity to be a fluid, and that conception led a number of men to attempt bottling the fluid by holding a water-filled glass vial in their hands and touching the water to a conductor suspended from an active electrostatic generator. On removing the jar from the machine and touching the water with his free hand, each of these investigators experienced a severe shock.

—Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The crews of steamers were from the upper Congo, mainly from Bangala. Like Marlow's cannibal crew, the Bangalas were joyfully cannibalistic. The brother of Bapulula (popular pilot on the mission steamer Peace on the river at this time), when asked if he ate human flesh, answered, "Ah! I wish I could eat everybody on earth."

—Norman Sherry, Conrad's Western World, quoted in Cedric Watts' footnotes to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"Doesn't she criticize the books you read?"

"Me? I don't read books!" Irnerio says.

"What do you read, then?"

"Nothing. I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us."

—Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

[...] A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by means of eliminating one of the rooks' pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, disputes, and ends by rejecting this innovation.

—Jorge Louis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" in Fictions

People became wildly excited by it. One evening at the Salle Vivienne, after the Apotheosis, some young men were moved to pick up their chairs and pound them against the floor, yelling as they did so. The management promptly gave orders that at subsequent performances patrons would kindly express their enthusiasm in more customary ways.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

Three bent rusty old muskets hang near the fragrant nostrum, testifying to a no less remarkable miracle: some sportsmen, who had rashly overloaded their guns, realized in the act of firing the danger they were in and, while their weapons were going off, called upon St Benedict (in abbreviated form, no doubt) and were duly preserved not merely from death but from the slightest scratch.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

Joshua walked through the sutler's camp with his father, afterward, hoping to run into Dorrie.
Buy, there was no end of gun stuff. You could get actual Civil War-era formula gunpowder, antique weaponry, musket balls, and—whoa—Civil War-era unexploded bullets ready to be fired by a Civil War-era gun.

There were seamstresses who made the rounds of re-enactments in the South to sew on period buttons to period costumes. Most of the costumes (particularly for the modern fellow, who was much bigger than his nineteenth-century counterpart) were contemporary, made from blends of fabric as close to the period as possible. But that didn't mean you couldn't have the era's buttons, medals, handkerchiefs, bootlaces. (How did they get the 1860s bootlaces?) And there was a brisk trade in tobacco products and antique pipes, pipe stuffers, cans of tobacco from the period (the pipe tobacco inside was fresh, presumably), and flints and lighting devices although the safety match was invented by the time of the Civil War, but these guys liked doing things as old-fashionedly as possible.

You could buy food—some stands advertised "modern" food, and some sold hardtack and biscuits and cured meat. Josh wondered if the people running the stands went out and bought a load of beef jerky for the occasion, but his father put him straight—everything was cooked on an old wood-burning stove or cured in a smoke-cured barn, just like it would have been in the 1860s.

"Did the barn have to be around in the 1860s," Josh asked, "or is that pushing it too much?"

His father, unsmiling: "There is no 'too much.'"

—Wilton Barnhardt, Lookaway, Lookaway

There are persons who can move their ears, either one at a time, or both together. There are some who, without moving the head, can bring the hair down upon the forehead, and move the whole scalp backwards and forwards at pleasure. Some, by lightly pressing the stomach, bring up an incredible quantity and variety of things they have swallowed, and produce whatever they please, quite whole, as if out of a bag. Some so accurately mimic the voices of birds and beasts and other men, that, unless they are seen, the difference cannot be told. Some have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing. I myself have known a man who was accustomed to sweat whenever he wished.

—Augustine, The City of God