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Yarbs, yarbs; natur, natur; you foolish old file, you! He diddled you with that hocus-pocus, did he? Yarbs and natur will cure your incurable cough, you think.

Amedical scientist made a presentation where he made it clear that those people who use the words 'me,' 'mine,' and 'I' frequently are more at risk of suffering from a heart attack.

I have no faith or hope in you more. I know you now, only as an enemy to me and to my house--it is mockery and hypocrisy to call you son; it is an insult to Clara, and even to Ralph, to think of you as my child. In this record
your place is destroyed--and destroyed for ever.

Never was a richly
furnished room more thoroughly comfortless than this--the eye ached at
looking round it. There was no repose anywhere.

'Youth?' said Bim, her head sinking as if with sleep, or sorrow. 'Yes, I am glad, too, it is over—what it did to us—and one is too young to know how to cope, how to deal with that first terrible flood of life. One just goes under—it sweeps one along—and how many years it is before one can stand up to it, make a stand against it' she shook her head sleepily. 'I never wish it back. I would never be young again....'

They looked at me suspiciously when I said this, as if they thought I was saying that the English were planning to capture and occupy Trabzon, and I wished we could do this, except that we spoil anywhere we occupy, like Cyprus and Gibraltar, with barracks and dull villas and pre-fabs.

Aunt Dot was a clever, impetuous driver, taking the sharpest bends with the greatest intrepidity. A brilliant and unorthodox improviser, she usually managed to work her way out of the jams she not infrequently got us into.

John Lloyd Stephens: 'Architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts
which embellish life, had flourished in this oyergrown forest ; orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory, had lived and passed away, and none
knew that such things had been, or could tell of their past existence.

But her eyes were in long focus now, looking back over the continent of her life. She may have been feeling what I felt, the subterranean jolt as the case moved once again, with enough force to throw a dead man out of his grave.

He took me into the house, his wife following us at a little distance. It was more like a public building than a house -- the kind of place where you go to pay your taxes or get a divorce.

The closer one gets to any problem in Guatemala, the more one's analysis begins to crack and shatter into fragments of irreconcilable detail. One historian confessed to me that he no longer thought there was any such thing as reality in Guatemala: 'People ask me what my sources are and I tell them rumor. You listen to rumors and you pick the one you like best.' It wasn't merely a joke.

It is often said of nations in Latin America that there are always two countries: a paper country and a real one. The paper Guatemala has a constitution, a system of justice, and regular free elections. In the real Guatemala, selfish interests seize power and hold it by corruption and terror.

Guatemala is a country where things are easily hidden, especially the truth.

I wondered at the fact that a person who loves us can increase our unhappiness.

--Do you think it was one of these men?
--I don't think anything, gentlemen. My job is not to think, but to get proofs or confessions.

The Americans were defying George III, under the extraordinary idea that George III ruled England. When they set up their republic, the simple colonists probably really did think that England was a monarchy.

Two women had been murdered but that didn't seem to grease the wheels of the government. Money did. At least the mission wouldn't be funded. But someone had to pay, Aimee told herself.

With a blinding flash the Mercedes exploded. With a deafening roar, the car burst into a white-yellow ball of flame. Aimee faltered, and everything seemed to move in slow motion, but it could only have been microseconds. Tires and doors blew off like missiles, into the stone buildings. She saw Anais rise in the air, as if she were flying then disappear. The ground reverberated.

To my way of thinking, the three greatest archaeological discoveries ever made in the Maya area were the murals of Bonampak, the murals of San Bartolo, and the tomb inside the basal pyramid of Palenque's Temple of the Inscriptions.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the autumn of 1952 was a most unlikely place and time for a great breakthrough in Maya decipherment.

The history of the American continent does not begin with Christopher Columbus, or even with Leif the Lucky, but with those Maya scribes in the Central American jungles who first began to record the deeds of their rulers some two thousand years ago.

And thus the time passed, and thus he lived until he discovered that time did not exist, that it was but that fallacious notion which makes us begin to fear Death—who, moreover, can come at any moment and stop time's passing. There is no cause to be sad, he would tell himself. And he was not sad. There is no cause to be happy, either, he would tell himself.

Mary was demonstrating, as always, her exquisite grace, but she also revealed a dark vanity and that fatal ingratitude of swimmers who never admit to the danger they had been in and who dismiss those who rescue them.

He [the real killer] is still here. Everything you said is right, except you forgot one thing. He's got the leverage now. When he escaped, the leverage shifted to Waits. And if he is smart, and it appears he is, he'll use it. He'll stick around and he'll use [DA Rick] O'Shea to maximum potential.

Bosch craved the intimacy and reveled in the escape it brought. He knew she knew this too. Her gift to him was in taking him away from the world. And that was why the past no longer mattered. He closed his eyes but didn't stop smiling.

It was her clothes that got to Bosch. The way they were folded so neatly. Did she do that? Or had it been the one who took her from this world? It was the little questions that always bothered him, filled the hollow inside with dread.

All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside.

The Maya still live in this area today, numbering over 7.5 million speakers of the 28 Mayan languages.

Happiness, I argues, doesn't like to oblige people because people don't give it (happiness) any holidays. If people knew how to live like the sonata, in three movements, interspersing meetings with partings, allowing happiness to go off for short spells, for a few bars at least, they mightn't be so unhappy.