Aglaya turned seriously angry and became twice as pretty.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

We reached the town of Wilton, parked, and made our way up toward the house. Wilton house is majestic, a grand, Palladian-style manor set on a vast expanse of carefully landscaped grounds and gardens. It put me in mind of Pemberley, Mr. Darcy's fictional country estate in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Actually, the Pemberley scenes for the 2005 movie adaptation starring Kiera Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen were filmed here.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

The groom's room was small and smelled of sandalwood and primogeniture.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.

—Mark Greif, "What Was the Hipster?" in New York Magazine

I felt comparatively happy, but I can assure the reader that I had had a far worse time of it than I have told him; and I strongly recommend him to remain in Europe if he can; or, at any rate, in some country which has been explored and settled, rather than go into places where others have not been before him. Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon

Reformers were divided over whether the use of equipment did children any good. One described the psychological effect of swinging as "similar to getting drunk," while another derided it as "unsocial." "It gives very little training to the eye or the hand of the judgment." For girls, the swing was seen as a potential source of "voluptuous excitement."

—Alexandra Lange, The Design of Childhood

We can trace this from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population increased and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky. The very idea is as boring as the tower was high, and a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Either / Or

 The furniture was rigidly uncomfortable and thus eminently suited to family state occasions; it also discouraged use and so lasted forever.

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

Soon, with Dickson and William Heise in charge of the motion-picture production, Edison's studio began releasing an increasing variety of full-length (in 1894 that meant less than a minute) films. The first copyrighted product, a would-be comical clip that showed Fred Ott, an Edison employee, sneezing into a handkerchief, was followed by pictures of an amateur gymnast, of a lightning shave in a barbershop, and of Eugene Sandow, an Austrian strong man, flexing his upper torso. Nearly 80 pictures were made in 1894, and they included wrestlers, cock fights, terriers attacking rats, Buffalo Bill and Indian war council, and the gyrations of skimpily dressed dancers. Comparisons of some leading subjects of mainstream U.S. filmmaking a century later are unavoidable: wrestling, violence, Westerns, sex, even another muscle-displaying Austrian (Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course.)

—Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century

Attending a recent conference on nutrition and health, of all things, I was astounded to see that in addition to the copious buffet at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our hosts wheeled out a copious buffet halfway between breakfast and lunch and then again halfway between lunch and dinner, evidently worried that we would not be able to survive the long crossing from one meal to the next without a between-meal meal.

—Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto

Watching the coast as it slips by a ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth."

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

The playbills had announced that the solo violin part in the Nina ballet would be played by Baillot. Either because he was indisposed or for some other reason, the virtuoso was unable to perform; but the management saw fit to inform the audience only by means of a minute strip of paper pasted across the placard at the entrance of the Opéra, which is never read by anybody. The vast majority were therefore expecting to hear the great violinist.

We had reached the moment when Nina, supported on either side by her father and her betrothed, comes to her senses. Not even Mlle Bigottini's touching pantomime could make us forget Baillot. the scene was nearly over when: "Wait a minute, what about the violin solo?" I said, in a voice loud enough to be heard. "He's right," someone said, "it looks as if they're leaving it out. Baillot! Baillot! The violin solo!" At that the whole pit fired up. And then—something unheard of at the Opéra—the entire house rose and demanded that the program be carried out according to the bill. While this uproar was proceeding, the curtain came down. At that, the clamour redoubled. The players, alarmed by the fury of the pit, hastily abandoned the field; whereupon the enraged public invaded the orchestra, hurling chairs in all directions, overturning desks, bursting the drums. In vain I shouted, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, what are you doing? You're breaking the instruments. This is madness. Can't you see that's old Chénié's double bass, a wonderful instrument with a superb black tone?" No one listened to me now. The rioters did not stop until they had laid waste the whole orchestra and left numerous instruments and chairs in ruins.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

Those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them, still doing right: and striving with political men may make the cause political, not by what they do, but by what they are.

—T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

What is more formal than a family dinner? An official occasion of uncomfortable people who meet very seldom, making conversation.

—T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

So far Greg was the only star that had risen from their little group of campus hotshots. That had been apparent from the moment they sat down. Any time the others had a comment to make, they looked at Greg when they made it.

—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Don't tell me about it!" Amory almost shrieked. "Don't say a word; I'm tired and pepped out."
Tom looked at him queerly and then sank into a chair and opened his Italian note-book. Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. "Wells is sane," he thought, "and if he won't do I'll read Rupert Brooke."

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

In the district of Acquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one of them said, "Let us find out the way in which people are hanged." While one was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak, a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy's father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was. Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families, and within a month 36 persons were killed, women as well as men.

---Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy