Ross

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

“The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.”
― Robert A Heinlein, Friday

“I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.”
― H. Beam Piper, Four Day Planet