Lucius18 H

“Her hair, which was powdered with violet sand, and combined into the form of a tower, after the fashion of the Chanaanite maidens, added to her height. Tresses of pearls were fastened to her temples, and fell to the corners of her mouth, which was as rosy as a half-open pomegranate. On her breast was a collection of luminous stones, their variegation imitating the scales of the murena. Her arms were adorned with diamonds, and issued naked from her sleeveless tunic, which was starred with red flowers on a perfectly black ground. Between her ankles she wore a golden chainlet to regulate her steps, and her large dark purple mantle, cut of an unknown material, trailed behind her, making, as it were, at each step, a broad wave which followed her.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo

“The fact that the terrorists came not only from the sewers of the WhiteGuard counter-revolution, but also from the scum of the Trotzky-Zinoviev opposition, tended to confuse some of those friends of the Soviet Revolution who do not know how bitterly Trotzky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their followers fought against the Party and against the policies of the Soviet government since the first days of the October Revolution, whenever the Party had to make a decisive step or overcome a new hardship. They do not know that Trotzky and the Trotzkyites in the capitalist countries are in the forefront of the enemies of the proletarian dictatorship and of the Soviet Union and that they made it their business to supply the capitalist press with the most poisonous ammunition against the Party, just as Zinoviev, Kamenev and their followers did, according to their own published confessions in the Soviet Union.”
― M. Katz, The assassination of Kirov; proletarian justice versus White-Guard terror

“I no longer have patience to spare for this
Europe where the autumn has the face of
spring and spring the smell of misery. But
I imagine with delight that other country
where summer crushes everything, where
the winter rains flood the towns and where,
finally, things are what they are”
― Albert Camus

“No great genius has ever existed without some touch
of madness.1
—Aristotle (384–322 BC)”
― Aristotle