Stephen Latch

“He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times—the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example—when it had been difficult. But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn’t count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the “youthful wards” that he routinely assigned to his heroes—a propensity that would, from that day forward, enter into comics lore and haunt him for the rest of his life—represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“There's a formality in academia that can't be ignored, even if a man is busy with other things, like trying not to die.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“She was a nightmare of beauty and ferocity, with a perfection of feature and line not found on Earth. Ruxandra was stunned out of fear for a moment. That such a creature could exist—that the nuns’ embroidered tales of demons, were not only true but were a bare and pathetic next to the real thing. This demon. This queen.”
― John Patrick Kennedy, Princess Dracula

“had come to London for a reason, not to enjoy anonymity and solitude whilst eyeing the wider horizon.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures