Sherilyn Jungling

“Such general complaints of the scarcity of money do not always prove that the usual number of gold and silver pieces are not circulating in the country, but that many people want those pieces who have nothing to give for them.”
― Adam Smith

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“It was Merlin’s first time in the Reform Club but he could see instantly it was cast in a similar mould to the various other London gentlemen’s clubs he had been obliged to visit before in the course of his duties. He had never been able to understand the attraction of these gloomy places, where upper-class, middle-aged and elderly men hid themselves away behind rustling newspapers or dozed in dark rooms full of heavy leather armchairs splattered with cigarette ash and drink stains.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy

“As people, other people, living in a house who . . . borrow things?"
Mrs. May laid down her work. "What do you think?" she asked.
"I don't know," Kate said, pulling hard at her shoe button. "There can't be. And yet"-she raised her head-"and yet sometimes I think there must be."
"Why do you think there must be?" asked Mrs. May.
"Because of all the things that disappear. Safety pins, for instance. Factories go on making safety pins, and every day people go on buying safety pins and yet, somehow, there never is a safety pin just when you want one. Where are they all? Now, at this minute? Where do they go to? Take needles," she went on. "All the needles my mother ever bought-there must be hundreds-can't just be lying about this house."
"Not lying about the house, no," agreed Mrs. May.
"And all the other things we keep on buying. Again and again and again. Like pencils and match boxes and sealing-wax and hairpins and drawing pins and thimbles-”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers