Karl Drinkwater

“When the rich give a party and the meal is finished, a man carries round amongst the guests a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, carved and painted to look as much like the real thing as possible, and anything from 18 inches to 3 foot long; he shows it to each guest in turn, and says: "Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead."
[Herodotus ‘Histories’, II 82]”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“Sad-looking brown eyes, they wrenched his heart like a gut punch. Worse – hell, worse – a bloke could punch him in the head but he’d stay up, and grin through the bloody split lip, intimidating his attacker; but there was no honour in wounds inside, wounds that only you could deal with.”
― Karl Drinkwater, Turner

“These rare mini mind-blanks always seemed to occur when he needed perking up, creative jolts as if his brain had temporarily overclocked its processor to light-speed frequency, but with the side effect of shutting his consciousness down to protect it from overheating. That theory certainly fit the observable phenomena.

Then again, the competing theories included: he was nuts; he had a brain tumour; aliens had temporarily abducted him.”
― Karl Drinkwater, Cold Fusion 2000

“He wondered where his mind had wandered this time, what life it had lived as a trail of neurons sped through networks of possibilities particle-fast, too rapid to catch without a hadron collider, causing super quarks of weirdness and leaving him with only a vague after-image like a melting dream. He had to accept that he couldn’t catch all his thoughts, all the things going on in his body, the processes which slipped by in the background just leaving a shadow, an itch, the grain of sand that probably wouldn’t become a pearl, a blazing after-trace that lives a second then is gone forever. All those possibilities occurring in a second of frantic life: it never ceased to amaze him. The world was an incredible and beautifully constructed thing.

However, there wasn’t really time for a wank.”
― Karl Drinkwater, Cold Fusion 2000