“I didn't have the time to slice a hundred shallow cuts into his lips and make him suck limes. I was too busy to make him swallow oiled musket balls. I had more important things to think about now and a lot to do. -Saffron in Dust of 100 Dogs”
― A.S. King

“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon