Tom Gray

“The very houses seemed disposed to pack up and take trips. Wonderful Members of Parliament, who, little more than twenty years before, had made themselves merry with the wild railroad theories of engineers, and given them the liveliest rubs in cross-examination, went down into the north with their watches in their hands, and sent on messages before by the electric telegraph, to say that they were coming.”
― Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

“New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort’s wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“The adult world moved around us the way fetid water in a fish tank surrounds the little fish within.”
― Erica Jong, Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex – A Provocative Anthology Exploring Desire, Bedroom Lives, and Candor