The earlier gentleman with the fists even considered himself offended, once the "petitioner" was accepted into the company and, being taciturn by nature, merely growled now and then like a bear and looked with profound scorn upon the fawning and facetiousness of the "petitioner," who turned out to be a worldly and politic man. By the looks of him, the lieutenant promised to succeed in "the business" more by adroitness and dodging than by strength, being also of smaller stature than the fist gentleman. Delicately, without getting into an obvious argument, but boasting terribly, he had already hinted more than once at the advantages of English boxing; in short, he turned out to be a pure Westernizer. At the word "boxing," the fist gentleman merely smiled scornfully and touchily, and without condescending, for his part, to an obvious debate with his rival, displayed now and then, silently, as if accidentally, or, better to say, exposed to view now and then, a perfectly national thing—a huge fist, sinewy, gnarled, overgrown with a sort of reddish fuzz—and everyone could see clearly that if this profoundly national thing were aptly brought down on some object, there would be nothing left but a wet spot.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

But the silent stranger was scarcely able to understand anything: she was a traveling German lady and did not know a world of Russian; besides that, it seems she was as stupid as she was beautiful. She was a novelty, and it was an accepted thing to invite her to certain evenings, in magnificent costume, her hair done up as if for an exhibition, and to sit her there like a lovely picture to adorn the evening, just as some people, for their evenings, borrow some painting, vase, statue, or screen from their friends for one time only.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Waugh is a classic in the venerable tradition of the English eccentric, with hair flying up wildly around a bald crown like an electrocuted scientist.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

"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

Oh, the world was full in those days; it seemed so much more alive than these quiet times when a new thing could take many lifetimes to finish its long birth labors and the world stay the same for generations. In those days a thousand things began and ended in a single lifetime, great forces clashed and were swallowed up in other forces riding over them. It was like some monstrous race between destruction and perfection; as soon as some piece of the world was conquered, after vast effort by millions, as when they build Road, the conquest would turn on the conquerors, as Road killed thousands in their cars; and in the same way, the mechanical dreams the angels made with great labor and inconceivable ingenuity, dreams broadcast on the air like milkweed seeds, all day long, passing invisibly through the air, through walls, through stone walls, through the very bodies of the angels themselves as they sat to await them, and appearing then before every angel simultaneously to warn or to instruct, one dream dreamed by all so that all could act in concert, until it was discovered that the dreams passing through their bodies were poisonous to them somehow, don't ask me how, and millions were sickening and dying young and unable to bear children, but unable to stop the dreaming even when the dreams themselves warned them that the dreams were poisoning them, unable or afraid to wake and find themselves alone, until the Long League awakened the women and the women ceased to dream: and all this happening in one man's lifetime.

And it all went faster as the Storm came on, that is the Storm coming on was the race drawing to its end; the solutions grew stranger and more desperate, and the disasters greater, and in the teeth of them the angels dreamed their wildest dreams, that we would live forever or nearly, that we would leave the earth, the spoiled earth, entirely and float in cities suspended between the earth and the moon forever, a dream they could not achieve because of the Wars starting and the millions of them falling out in a million different ways and all at each other's throats. And the Long League growing secretly everywhere as the desperate solutions fell to ruins or exploded in the faces of their makers, the Long League in secret struggle with the angels, who hardly knew of its existence in their midst till the League was the only power left when the Law and the Gummint had exhausted themselves with the Wars and in the struggle to keep the world man's; and for that matter the truthful speakers beginning the speech over the thousand phones of the Co-op Great Belaire; and while the million lights were going out, and the mechanical dreams fading and leaving the angels alone in the terrible dark, the Planters, thousand-armed and -eyed and wiser than any human being, searched other skies and suns at the angel's bidding, and brought home the trees of bread and who knows what else now lost; and nobody able to comprehend everything going on all at once, and no wonder either; and then the Storm, which anybody could have seen, and it all began to stop, and kept stopping till the old woodlands which they had never been in before and looking around in wonder at the old world as though it were as strange as their dreams had truly been.

Blink said: "It was as though a great sphere of many-colored glass had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smashing, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at—but which can never be put back together again."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

It was a pleasure to see him handle a tool of any kind, but he was quite splendid with an eighteen inch file.

—An old workman from Henry Maudslay's shop, quoted in Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hootings of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lord's clarions rested! No wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock,—to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,—think of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he become unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I was taught to clean by my mother, a compulsive housekeeper who employed water so hot you needed rubber gloves to get into it and in such Niagara-like quantities that most microbes were probably crushed by the force of it before the soap suds had a chance to rupture their cell walls.

—Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

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

I am there now, as I write; I fancy that I can see the downs, the hits, the plain, and the river-bed — that torrent pathway of desolation, with its distant roar of waters. Oh, wonderful! wonderful! so lonely and so solemn, with the sad grey clouds above, and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the mountain side, as though its little heart were breaking. Then there comes some lean and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect, trotting back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this gully, and now that, and now she stands listening with uplifted head, that she may hear the distant wailing and obey it. Aha! they see, and rush towards each other. Alas! they are both mistaken; the ewe is not the lamb's ewe, they are neither kin nor kind to one another, and part in coldness. Each must cry louder, and wander farther yet; may luck be with them both that they may find their own at nightfall. But this is mere dreaming, and I must proceed.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon

As children completed each primer, they would move farther from the teacher, so that everyone in a row would be studying the same book and could file forward as a class. In practice, this meant that the schoolroom was arranged from small to large, with the youngest children closest to the teacher and to the heat source. As the bigger children aged out of school in their early to mid-teens, the boys to farming, the girls to marriage or school teaching of their own, they moved closer and closer to the door, until finally they were free.

—Alexandra Lange, The Design of Childhood

On days when the sun shone and I could see the great gleaming wilderness stretching forbiddingly about us, I kept imagining our poor shattered army on that murderous retreat and pictured the wretched men, coatless, no boots on their feet, without bread, without brandy to warm them, their morale and their physical strength reduced to nothing, wounded for the most part, by day dragging themselves along, a ghost army, by night stretched out in the open, corpselike, on that appalling snow in a cold more terrible still than I shivered in; and I wondered how even one soldier among them could have come through and lived to escape from this white hell. It must take an awful lot to make a man die.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

While speaking Jean had rung, and a waiter had come.

"Simon," he said to him, "prepare a supper tomorrow for six persons. A supper such as we had here at the time of my marriage to Berthe. Do you remember it, before Christmas? In the same room."

"Ah, sir, could one forget such a supper? You shall have it."

—N. G. Chernyshevsky, What is to be Done?

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

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

Should we never be heard of more, you may conclude that we have been eaten.
 
—Thomas Stamford Raffles, in a letter to the Duchess of Somerset written before his departure to Sumatra, quoted in Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

Graphite is non-toxic: pencil makers claim you can eat a pencil a day and not get sick.

— Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting