David

“If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Merlyn held up his hand. “Give him the humble earth-worm,” he said majestically. So the animals recited in unison: “The naturalist Darwin has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth-worms in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone 320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will alter the whole earth’s surface to the depth of seven inches. ‘The earth without worms,’ says the immortal Gilbert White, ‘would soon become cold, hard-bound, void of fermentation, and consequently sterile.’​”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Conclusion to the Once and Future King

“Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera; Or the Nihilists