Mark

“Beg pardon?" I detected large deposits of vanity. Vanity is the softest of bedrocks to sink shafts into.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')”
― Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

“It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a
piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in
twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had one by one,
firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached
Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping
for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now
far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and
occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely
defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together,
in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q?
What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which
is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is
only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R
it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he
was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he knocked
his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn,
and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“She found the page, cleared her throat and began to read, " 'There was nary a doubt that I had ever seen such big ones, round and ripe. My teeth ached to bite them' " God, what tripe! ”
― Johanna Lindsey, Gentle Rogue