Marivel

“It started to feel like this thing happening to me was an invisible wall between us, a barrier none of us wanted to acknowledge but that was continuously pushing us apart. I started to feel like an outsider even among my closest friends.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“She gave him a brief, mysterious smile. “You were watching me. I felt you before I saw you.”
So? This is a crime? he thought, determined not to retreat.
Did you study cultural physiology?
The eyes of Italian males are hardwired from birth to examine, observe, even caress, if you will, the female form. Any form. Some we glance at. Some we don’t really see, like our mothers and sisters. Some we ignore, and some we store as reference for the future. Got it?”
― Vincent Panettiere, Shared Sorrows

“Chuck skipped through the rest of the preamble to the actual examples
Spaceguard had chronicled:
“On March 23rd, 1989, an asteroid designated Asteroid 1989FC missed
hitting the Earth by six hours. This little jewel packed the energy of
roughly a thousand of the most powerful nuclear bombs, and the human
race became aware of it shortly after its closest approach. Had this celestial
baseball been only six hours later most of the population of the Earth
would have been eliminated with zero warning.”
“In October of 1990, an asteroid that would have been considered
very small, struck the Pacific Ocean. This little fellow only packed the
energy of a small atomic bomb, about the same as the one that flattened
Hiroshima, and if it had arrived a few hours later or earlier it could have
easily struck a city rather than making a relatively harmless splash into
the center of the ocean. Remember, relatively here, is just a comparative
term.”   ”
― Jody Summers, The Mayan Legacy

“What the hell, if you are going to roll the dice with Lucifer, I say go the distance.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow