Claudia

“So, I am not mad, nor am I a sex maniac. Simply, at the age of forty, I have decided to live as I please, not worrying about conventions, or laws, because I have found out, rather late in the day, that nobody observes them and that, until now, I have been duped.”
― Georges Simenon, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

“Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Pigs are special: They excrete far more of the virus than other livestock, and over a longer period of time, broadcasting it prodigiously in their respiratory exhalations. They sneeze it, they chuff it, they oink it, they wheeze it and burp it and cough it into the air. One experimental study found that pig breath carried thirty times as much FMD virus as the breath of an infected cow or sheep, and that once airborne it could spread for miles. That’s why pigs are considered an amplifier host of this virus.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything