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| Again, things that seem to us hard and stiff must be composed of deeply indented and hooked atoms and held firm by their intertangling branches. In the front rank of this class stand diamonds, with their steadfast indifference to blows. Next come stout flints and stubborn steel and bronze that stands firm with shrieking protest when the bolt is shot. Liquids, on the other hand, must owe their fluid consistency to component atoms that are smooth and round. For poppy-seed can be poured as easily as if it were water; the globules do not hold one another back, and when they are jolted they tend to roll downhill as water does. A third class is constituted by things that you may see dissapated instantaneously, such as smoke, clouds and flames. If their atoms are not all smooth and round, yet they cannot be jagged and intertangled. They must be such as to prick the body and even to penetrate rocks but not to stick together; so you can readily grasp that substances hurtful to the senses but not solid are sharp-pointed but without projections. [Titus Lucretius Carus and (trans R.E. Latham) ,The Nature of the Universe,55 BCE,locate] |
| Naked, Trudy Quillan was even more appealing than clothed. At sixteen her young, hard body was as voluptuously developed as that of a nineteen-year-old's; her dark eyes wide, trusting, capable of being filled to moistness with passion newly-found and most of all, love. The object of her love, Stag Preston, was staring down at her naked form with horror, disbelief and anger. "You are what?" he was saying, as the Colonel and Shelly planned his future. "I'm gonna have a baby," Trudy said again, not quite understanding how her lover man could fail to understand the meaning of the word pregnant. [Harlan Ellison,Spider Kiss,1961,locate] |
| But Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by a dark sky; a window-box with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on the window-sill of a cement-factory. [Lawrence Durrell,Justine,1957,locate] |
| He was twenty yards away when he fired his first burst, and no more than five yards from the enemy when he pressed the button again. The second burst killed the pilot and the observer. The machine spun down with the engine full on and buried itself nose first in a field near Monchy-le-Preux. [William Arthur Bishop,The Courage of the Early Morning,1965,locate] |
| "If you want me to treat you as I would treat a silly, twittering miss, then you must be silly and twitter and look at me as if I were the most marvelous man in the whole world." He smiled in a superior way at Fanny's averted face. Fanny suddenly looked at him with a world of tenderness and adoration in her eyes. Her body appeared to sway towards him, and she said huskily, "Oh, my hero!" He was shaken to the core. His hands were about to reach for her when she said maliciously, "Something like that, my lord?" [Marion Chesney,The First Rebellion,1989,locate] |
| Something was wrong with Shebat, some outboard wrongness that was not in any one of her systems but pervaded all of them, something Marada must isolate and put to right. [Janet Morris,Dream Dancer,1980,locate] |
| I thought about the applause afterward. Some of it was, perhaps, in appreciation of the lunacy of my participation, and for the fortitude it took to do it; but most of it, even if subconscious, I decided was in relief that I had done as badly as I had: it verified the assumption that the average fan would have about an amateur blundering into the brutal world of professional football. He would get slaughtered. [George Plimpton,Paper Lion,1966,locate] |
| His chest was like a red washboard when he finished. But the end was not yet. Rubber- covered fingertips held the top incision open, as with the other hand he scooped up some of the sterile muddy dirt. Then he rubbed it quickly into the incision, ignoring the stabs of new pain as he pressed the lips of the cut together over the dirt. [Bruce Elliott,Asylum Earth,1952,locate] |
| About three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man--or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of--and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man--but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. [Edgar Allan Poe,The Descent into the Maelström,1841,locate] |
| He took twenty seconds to die, the kind of twenty seconds that will stay with a man in his nightmares till he draws his last breath on earth. I had seen many men die, but even those who had died in bullet and shrapnel- torn agony had done so peacefully and quietly compared to this man whose body, in the incredibly convulsive violence of its death throes, twisted and flung itself into the most fantastic and impossible contortions. [Alistair MacLean,The Satan Bug,1962,locate] |
| 'My friend,' he said at last, 'if you go die I get sorry too much.' [Gerald Durrell,The Bafut Beagles,1954,locate] |
| To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame. [George Eliot,Middlemarch,1872,locate] |
| Strong looked up, up, up into the branches above him, and it was like looking up at the vaulted dome of a cathedral. He could feel the damp coolness of the tree's transpiration. And he could feel his fear. It was a bleak fear - a cold, foreboding temple in the green atmosphere of his thoughts. And he could feel something else. A thought that was not his own? It did not seem to be a thought and yet it must be. It was couched in words: When I die, you die too. [Robert F. Young,The Last Yggdrasill,1982,locate] |
| Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping rock-strewn meadows. The figures are so silent and furtive that ones feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. [H.P. Lovecraft,The Dunwich Horror,1928,locate] |
| The sailor rushed straight into the midst of the debris and risked his life searching for money. Having found some, he ran off with it to get drunk; and after sleeping off the effects of the wine, he bought the favours of the first girl of easy virtue he found amongst the ruined houses with the dead and dying all around. [Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire and (trans John Butt) ,Candide or Optimism,1759,locate] |
| Tom flipped the pages and looked down the verses. "Now here is one," he said. "This here's a nice one, just blowed full a religion: 'Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.' How's that?" "That's real nice," said Ma. "Put that one in." [John Steinbeck,The Grapes of Wrath,1939,locate] |
| "'You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,' said I. 'Let me pay you one in return when I say that if I were assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter.' [Arthur Conan Doyle,The Final Problem,1894,locate] |
| "Oh!" The girl clapped her hands in extasy. " How many have you slain?" "Er--why, let me see," the young man blundered. "As a matter of face, I never kept any record of the panthers I killed." [Edgar Rice Burroughs,The Cave Girl,1913,locate] |
| Peoples still living in the stone age possess the same, often strange, motifs as the cultured nations. The particular character of some of the contents of folklore makes it impossible to assume that it was only by mere chance that the same motifs were created in all corners of the world. [Immanuel Velikovsky,Worlds in Collision,1950,locate] |
| It has been found necessary to vest in every government, even the most democratic, some extraordinary and, at first sight, alarming powers; trusting in public opinion and subsequent accountability, to modify the exercise of them. These are provided to meet exigencies, which all hope may never occur, and if they should, and there were no power to meet them instantly, there would be an end put to the government at once. [Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,Two Years Before the Mast,1840,locate] |
| A crow landed on the earth platform, with one harsh caw and a creak of wings. It cocked its head, its eyes sharp and brown, and hopped forward. Two more joined it, then three, then another one. Rodney's scalp tingled and he looked quickly around. To west and south black dots pockmarked the sky, swelling out and taking shape as they came closer - crows, flying fast to the peepul tree. They landed beside the Silver Guru in fours and squadrons until they overflowed the plinth. Then they crawled on top of one another at the feet of the crowd, and in silence flapped their wings and opened their beaks. Their eyes glinted with an awful obedience. Rodney knew suddenly that at a signal the slithery wings would smother him, the dirty beaks peck his eyes out. The air under the tree stank of putrid meat. [John Masters,Nightrunners of Bengal,1951,locate] |
| A man, therefore (so they say), should carry his profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not, he must earn his living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if he be a gentleman born and bred to no profession, he must pick oakum, or write art criticisms for a newspaper. [Samuel Butler,Erewhon,1872,locate] |
| "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." [Aldous Huxley,Brave New World,1932,locate] |
| She was a high-coloured blonde with golden hair of a metallic lustre, lovely no doubt but not attractive, and Ashenden had from the first reflected that it was not the sort of hair you would like to find in your soup. [W. Somerset Maugham,Ashenden: The British Agent,1927-51,locate] |
| My Dear Wormwood, Yes; courtship is the time for sowing the seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. [C.S. Lewis,The Screwtape Letters,1942,locate] |
| These people also have filing cabinets (not shoe boxes) with neat up-to-date, relevant files. They can find things around the house when they need them. There is order under their sinks, in their closets, and in the trunks of their cars. They actually change the filter on their furnace once a year. They put oil and grease on mechanical things. Their warranties runneth not out. Not only do their flashlights work, they actually know where the flashlights are! [Robert Fulghum,All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,1986,locate] |
| "I've a pretty good imagination of my own. I've been in tight places before now and got out of them! I think - I won't say more than that but I think I'll get out of this one." [Agatha Christie,And Then There Were None,1939,locate] |
| The first boy went on. His bare feet made no sound, falling softer than leaves in the thin dust. In the orchard the bees sounded like a wind getting up, a sound caught by a spell just under crescendo and sustained. The lane went along the wall, arched over, shattered with bloom, dissolving into trees. Sunlight slanted into it, sparse and eager. Yellow butterflies flickered along the shade like flecks of sun. [William Faulkner,The Sound and the Fury,1929,locate] |
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