Petra

“At times I felt as if I were the last survivor of an Ice Age, striving to hold on with the flimsy tools bequeathed by an easy-going, temperate world. Cold does queer things. At 500 below zero a flashlight dies out in your hand. At - 550 kerosene will freeze, and the flame will dry up on the
wick. At - 60° rubber turns brittle. One day, I remember, the antenna wire snapped in my hands when I tried to bend it to make a new connection. Below - 60° cold will find the last microscopic touch of oil in an instrument and stop it dead. If there is the slightest breeze, you can hear your breath freeze as it floats away, making a sound like that of Chinese firecrackers. As does the morning dew, rime coats every exposed object. And if you work too hard and breathe too deeply, your lungs will sometimes feel as if they were on fire.”
― Richard Evelyn Byrd, Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure

“There he gained a reputation among his classmates as an obsessive student, sometimes spending fifteen hours with his books, three hours practicing his violin and the remaining six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious young man.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx (National Book Award Winner): The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“There may be people to whose tempers and dispositions Contention may be pleasing,” he wrote to John Randolph in 1775, “but to me it is of all states, but one, the most horrid.” He much preferred “to withdraw myself totally from the public stage and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” The most astute student of Jefferson’s lifelong compulsion to make and then remake Monticello into a perfect palace and a “magical mystery tour of architectural legerdemain” has concluded that Jefferson’s obsessive “putting up and pulling down” are best understood as a form of “childhood play adapted to an adult world.” Both the expectations that Jefferson harbored for his private life in his mansion on the mountain, as well as his way of trying to design and construct it, suggested a level of indulged sentimentality that one normally associates with an adolescent.21”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx (National Book Award Winner): The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“to deprive unsuspecting colonists of their liberties. Like the Saxon myth, this way of thinking and talking about politics had deep roots in the Whig tradition in England, dating back to the Puritan dissenters during the English Civil War in the 1640s.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx (National Book Award Winner): The Character of Thomas Jefferson