Farfoff

“It is not now raining.” Inspired by his extreme verbal parsimony, his fellow students at St. John’s invented a unit of measurement for the number of words that a person might utter in conversation, christening the minimum rate one “Dirac”—one word per hour.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“I spent hours gazing out at the bright rivers and lush meadows. How little different it can have looked when this was China’s Outer Tartary. I also spent hours thinking about the pivotal moments in the story of the Amur, the fur-driven impulse that first brought the Russians to this place, the Manchu repulse that pushed them away, and finally the nineteenth-century nationalist urgings that brought them back. It was like a ball ricocheting over historical time, absorbing fresh energies (including, later, manufactured grievances) at critical points.”
― Dominic Ziegler, Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River Between Russia and China

“James II’s second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books),”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Actually, I bite the Milk Duds into four pieces and spit them back into the popcorn so they’re smaller, giving me a better popcorn-to-Milk-Dud ratio. Yes, they’re covered in saliva, but it’s my saliva. Though I can see how, to someone reaching into the popcorn he said he wasn’t going to eat, it could be an issue.”
― Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different