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

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

I drank a bottle of Falcon beer. It had a plain label. There were no boasts about choice hops and the stuff had won no medals at any international exposition but is was cold and tasted like every other beer.

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Vivien found the dress at Vince, across from her hotel at Madison and Seventy-Sixth. It was a simple shift, deliriously soft and just the right length, as in a bit too short but seemingly accidentally so, as if she were a touch taller and thinner than the intended model. It was effortless without being sloppy, editorial but in no way dressed up. With her low-tops and denim jacket, it would hit the right note, showing her off without her showing off. If the dress had come only in black, or only in navy, she wouold have gladly, almost thoughtlessly, purchased either. But unfortunately it came in both. She spent over half an hour in the dressing room switching between them, examining herself, posing, evaluating the implications, agonizing over the decision. It was amazing how the same dress in only slightly different colors could seem so different. But then again, nothing highlights difference quite like homogeneity. The black was so stark, so purely minimal. Very now, very New York. The navy would have seemed the same in isolation, but by contrast it almost felt like a grown-up version of something she might have worn at Penn or even Sill. Comparatively, it paid homage to prep without being preppy, developing a latent infusion of nostalgia and youth. She wanted to prefer the black. Reason told her to go for the black. In a movie, she'd definitely wear a black dress. But viscerally, physically, she felt lighter, looked younger in the navy. It made her feel how she wanted to feel in the black. Even if she bought both, she could wear only one. Vivien had to choose.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

A small New York agency recently hired personable actors to go into swanky watering holes like the Royalton, Cafe Tabac, and Bloom and ask for a martini made with Hennessy cognac rather than the usual gin or vodka. When the barkeep said that he had never heard of such a drink, the actors would explain in loud detail exactly what brands to use. J&B Scotch would hire beautiful women to walk into bars, order J&B, and grandly turn on their heel if there wasn't any.

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

Within weeks—some said days—it was ended, after the first unleashing of the hell-fire. Cities had become puddles of glass, surrounded by vast acreages of broken stone. Whole nations had vanished from the earth, the lands littered with bodies, both men and cattle, and all manner of beasts, together with the birds of the air and all things that flew, all things that swam in the rivers, crept in the grass, or burrowed in holes; having sickened and perished, they covered the land, and yet where the demons of the fallout covered the countryside, the bodies for a time would not decay, except in contact with fertile earth.

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

The Americans have traced out the circuit of an immense city on the site which they intend to make their capital, but which up to the present time is hardly more densely peopled than Pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a million inhabitants. They have already rooted up trees for ten miles around lest they should interfere with the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have erected a magnificent palace for Congress in the center of the city and have given it the pompous name of the Capitol.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

It has been calculated that the whites advance every year a mean distance of seventeen miles along the whole of this vast boundary. Obstacles such as an unproductive district, a lake, or an Indian nation are from time to time encountered. The advancing column then halts for a while; its two extremities curve round upon themselves, and as soon as they are reunited, they proceed onwards. This gradual and continuous progress of the European race towards the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onwards by the hand of God.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Nothing could be smarter, more splendid, more brilliant, better drawn up than the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, cannons, formed a harmony such has never been heard even in hell.

—Voltaire, Candide

I am most authentic when I am performing. I am really one hundred percent there. I can't say that about any other aspect of my life.

—Linda Montano, quoted in Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living

When the concert was over, Lipinski introduced me to a player who, he said, was desirous of congratulating me but did not know a word of French. As I cannot speak German, Lipinski was offering to interpret for us, when the man, interrupting him, sprang forward, seized my hand, stammered out a few words, and burst into uncontrollable sobs; whereupon Lipinski, turning to me and indicating his friend's tears, said, "You get the point."

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

Liszt was unanimously adopted as speaker. When the first toast was called, he rose and in the name of the whole company addressed me for a full quarter of an hour with a warmth of feeling, a wealth of ideas and a turn of phrase that many orators would envy. I was deeply touched. Unhappily, if he spoke well, he drank likewise. The fatal cup set such tides of champagne flowing that all Liszt's eloquence was shipwrecked in it. Belloni and I were still reasoning with him in the street at two in the morning, and urging on him the advisability of waiting until daylight before engaging in single combat with pistols at two yards' range with a Bohemian who had drunk even better than he. When daylight came we felt somewhat anxious for Liszt, who was giving a concert at noon. At half-past eleven he was still asleep. They finally woke him; he climbed into a carriage, arrived at the hall, entered to a triple-barreled broadside of applause, sat down, and played as I do not believe he has ever played in his life. Verily, there is a God . . . for pianists.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

Describing the great banquet arranged by Giovanni II Bentivoglio in Bologna in 1487 to celebrate the wedding of his son Annibale to Lucrezia d'Este, the chronicler Cherubino Ghirardacci wrote: "Before being served, [the dishes] were paraded with great ceremony around the piazza of the castle ... to show them to the people so that they might admire such magnificence." The feast, similar to any others described in chronicles and in culinary treatises, lasted seven hours, from eight in the evening to three in the morning, during which were served: small appetizers and wafers with several types of sweet wine; roasted pigeons, bits of pork liver, thrushes, partridges "with sugared olives and grapes", and bread; and a castle of sugar "with artfully constructed merlons and towers" and filled with live birds which as soon as the platter was brought into the hall flew out "to the great pleasure and delight of the diners". There followed deer and ostrich surrounded by various pastelli, veal's head, boiled capons, veal breast and loin, goat, sausage and partridge, all served with various sauces; then peacocks "dressed up in their own feathers as if spreading their tails," one for each guest; then mortadella, hares, and stewed deer dressed in its own skin so perfectly "as to appear alive"; followed by turtle-doves and pheasants "from whose beaks issued flames" accompanied by citrus and sauces. Next came sugar and almond cakes, "junket" (a preparation of fresh cheese) and biscuits; and again goat's head, turtle-doves, roast partridge, and "a castle full of rabbits" who ran out to the delight of the guests; then rabbit pastelli and "dressed capons". There followed an "artful castle" — banquet architecture, it should be noted, took as its primary model this symbol of power — containing a "large pig" which, trapped inside, grunted and snorted among the merlons. Meanwhile, the servers brought "whole golden-brown roasted suckling pigs", various other roasts, wild duck "and the like"; and finally sweets made from milk, jellies, pears, pastries, candies, marzipans "and other similar favours". Before leaving, the guests (who would in any case return the next day for breakfast) were given spiced confections and "precious wines". This entire feast, before arriving at the table, was paraded through the piazza so that the people "might admire such magnificence".

—Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food

[...] The fences that every night billposters of various factions cover with manifestos that are immediately soaked by the rain and become illegible because of the absorbent paper and the cheap ink.

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

Bolívar would enter each capital as a conqueror, on horseback, and would be greeted by “nymphs” (as they were always called) dressed in white, who would present him with garlands. The nymphs were usually recruited from a local brothel. Bolívar’s next step would be to go to whatever congress or legislature was gathered and (as he put it in Lima in 1823) “prostrate myself at the foot of the civil power, to recognize the sovereignty of the nation and manifest my submission to it.” He would hand over his sword, the deputies would hand it back to him, and he would carry on as before. Other generals also went through these pantomimes. At the old university town of Chuquisaca, Bolivia, Antonio José de Sucre was obliged to climb into a red-and-white Roman chariot drawn by 12 young men, then to be taken through the streets hidden behind immense pyramids and obelisks made of cardboard to an “Ionic Temple,” where six nymphs in white recited poetry.

                                                                                                

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

People, if they could afford it, made their gardens look “wild” and “ancient” by putting in bits of Gothic apparatus. Some proud owners of Gothic grottoes even hired poor old men to sit in them as hermits to impress visitors.
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

Every Sunday, in its design section, The New York Times Magazine ran a picture of some sort of apartment. I began to think of it as that apartment. The walls were always pure white and free of moldings, casings, baseboards, and all the rest. In the living room there were about 17,000 watts' worth of R-40 spotlights encased in white canisters suspended from the ceiling in what is known as track lighting. There was always a set of bentwood chairs, blessed by Le Corbusier, which no one ever sat in because they caught you in the small of the back like a karate chop. The dining-room table was a smooth slab of blond wood (no ogee edges, no beading on the legs), Around which was a set of the S-shaped, tubular steel, cane-bottomed chairs that Mies van der Rohe had designed—the second most famous chair designed in the twentieth century, his own Barcelona chair being the first, but also one of the five most disastrously designed, so that by the time the main course arrived, at least one guest had pitched face forward into the lobster bisque. Somewhere nearby was a palm or a dracaena fragrans or some other huge tropical plant, because all the furniture was so lean and clean and bare and spare that without some prodigious piece of frondose Victoriana from the nursery the place looked absolutely empty.

—Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

He gestured to a waiter, who stepped over the body, carrying a huge tray, and began serving a table a few feet away. Fallow looked at the faces at the tables all around. They stared at the appalling spectacle, but they did nothing. A large old man was lying on the floor in very bad condition. Perhaps he was dying. Certainly any of them who managed to get a look at his face could tell that much. At first they had been curious. Is he going to die right in front of us? At first there had been the titillation of Someone Else's Disaster. But now the drama was dragging on too long. The conversational roar had died down. The old man looked repulsive, with his pants unzipped and his big gross bare belly bulging out. He had become a problem of protocol. If an old man was dying on the carpet a few feet from your table, what was the proper thing to do? Offer your services? But there was already a traffic jam there in the aisle between the rows of tables. Clear the area and give him air and come back later to complete the meal? But how would empty tables help the man? Stop eating until the drama had played itself out and the old man was out of sight? But the orders were in, and the food had begun to arrive, and there was no sign of any halt—and this meal was costing about $150 per person, once you added in the cost of the wine, and it was no mean trick getting a seat in a restaurant like this in the first place. Avert your eyes? Well, perhaps that was the only solution. So they averted their eyes and returned to their picturesque dishes . . . but there was something damned depressing about it all, because it was hard for your eyes not to wander every few seconds to see if, f'r chrissake, they hadn't moved the stricken hulk. A man dying! O mortality! Probably a heart attack, too! That deep fear lodged in the bosom of practically every man in the room. The old arteries were clogging up micromillimeter by micromillimeter, day by day, month by month, from all the succulent meats and sauces and fluffy breads and wines and soufflés and coffee . . . And was that the way it would look? Would you be lying on the floor in some public place with a blue circle around your mouth and cloudy eyes that were half open and a hundred percent dead? It was a damned unappetizing spectacle. It made you queasy. It prevented you from relishing these expensive morsels arranged in such pretty pictures on your plate. So curiosity had turned to discomfort, which now turned to resentment—an emotion that had been picked up by the restauranteurs and doubled and then doubled again.

—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (ellipses in the original)

It was the smile of a boy at his own birthday party, the lad who is both humbled and wondrously elated by the realization that he is in a room full of people who are happy, abnormally happy, one might say, to see him alive and in their presence.

—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities