Gregorio Taillon

“A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author’s psyche.”
― John Hersey

“He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“CAPT. J. W. SIMMONS, master of the steamship Pensacola, had just as little regard for weather as the Louisiana’s Captain Halsey. He was a veteran of eight hundred trips across the Gulf and commanded a staunch and sturdy ship, a 1,069-ton steel-hulled screw-driven steam freighter built twelve years earlier in West Hartlepool, England, and now owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Friday morning the ship was docked at the north end of 34th Street, in the company of scores of other ships, including the big Mallory liner Alamo, at 2,237 tons, and the usual large complement of British ships, which on Friday included the Comino, Hilarius, Kendal Castle, Mexican, Norna, Red Cross, Taunton, and the stately Roma in from Boston with its Captain Storms. As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families. At”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“You know,” he said, “at some point you’re going to realize that being a smart-ass isn’t as much about being smart as it is about being an ass.” “That’s good,” I said. “Did you read that in a fortune cookie?”
― Garth Stein, A Sudden Light