Down below in the boiler the rats were stirring. The busy patter upstairs had made them curious. The footfalls of the children, light and quick, made them pause and look at one another. They began to quiver and gibber. Then on a signal from their captain they poured forth from the boiler and came slithering up the cellar stairs in a column to see what was going on. In the kitchen they met a horde of cockroaches who had emerged from their dark ruins, led by a big bull roach. They too had been disturbed by the new vibrations.

—Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

 Be careful going home in the snow, Asher. Snow is an enemy.

—Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

The media themselves—which used to be organized vertically with print at the top, then film, television, radio, and comics in descending order—have been so shaken up that a Pulitzer Prize can go to a comic book about mice, whereas most of what is atop the New York Times best-seller list might be better used as bedding for mice.

—James B. Twitchell, Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture

"Be like Mike," the Gatorade slogan promises. If you replenish your lost bodily fluids with their greenish slime, you will not only be drinking Michael Jordan's brand but will be participating in his majesty. This is what we have for the Eucharist.

—James B. Twitchell, Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture

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 1859 the State Superintendent of Public Instruction declared that "our present school system has furnished instruction to only 11,183 children out of 40,530; and to them for only five and a half months out of the twelve. If we do not take instant and effective means to remedy it these 29,347 neglected children will grow up into 29.347 benighted men and women—a number nearly sufficient at ordinary times to control the vote of the state, and in consequence to shape its legislation and its destiny." The legislature did not take "instant" measures of relief, and the 29,347 unfortunate ignoramuses were well along the road to maturity before the state's conscience troubled it.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

Four years later, in 1968, it was Kaiser who raised a guarantee of 300,000 marks from the city of Essen to start the international Essener Songtage festival, which, showing a flair for hyperbole, he heralded as "the biggest thing that ever happened in Europe."

—David Stubbs, Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary new Music

From Harwich to London you travel by a high road of nearly seventy miles, which is bordered, almost without interruption, by country houses on both sides; it is a succession of habitations with gardens, interrupted by towns; almost all of the people are well clad; scarcely a cottage is in decay, and even the animals have something peaceful and comfortable about them, as if there were rights for them also in this great edifice of social order.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

[...] A worthless town which, it seemed, was not even on the map and which not a single decent person in Petersburg knew about. If this wretched little town were suddenly to fall through the earth or burn down, people in Russia would read the telegram about it with the same boredom as the announcement of a sale of secondhand furniture.

—Anton Chekhov, The Duel

"This," said the fellow, producing one, "this is the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain, rust, dirt, mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen, cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bomazeen, or woolen stuff. Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains, all come out in one rub with the infallible and invaluable composition. If a lady stains her honour, she has only need to swallow one cake and she's cured at once—for it's poison."

—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

The road from Frankfurt to Stuttgart offers no points of interest, and I have no impressions to give you: not a single romantic haunt to describe, no dark forests, no monasteries, no lonely chapels or foaming torrents, no strange noise in the night, not even that of Don Quixote's windmills; not so much as a huntsman or milkmaid or weeping damsel, stray heifer, lost child, distracted mother, shepherd, robber, beggar or brigand to be seen; nothing but the moonlight and the sound of horses and the snores of the sleeping coachman, and here and there a few uncouth peasants under wide three-cornered hats, dressed in voluminous linen frock-coats which had once been white, with long trailing tails meeting between their muddy legs, the whole outfit giving them the appearance of village priests off duty—that's all!

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

If one may judge from what are believed to be their authentic portraits, they were quiet, religious, self-respecting people.

—Maurice Ashley, The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell

Charles Fourier, a businessman from Lyons, put forward some even more extravagant notions. He predicted the ideal world he was creating would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them an era of Perfect Harmony, during which the North Pole would be milder than the shores of the Mediterranean, the sea, no longer salt, would turn into lemonade, and the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 mathematicians equal to Newton, and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, though he modestly added, “These are approximate estimates.”

—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

Mallarmé's view that Poe had purified, renewed, and civilized the language of literature through his style is enough in itself to make one skeptical about French assessment of his work.

---——Julian Symons, The Tell-Tale Heart: the Life and Work of Edgar Allan Poe

The Bic Cristal [ballpoint pen] is one of the great designs of the century, and one of the greatest aids to communication and civilization ever conceived.

— Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink