James McGuffey

“Forgive me,’ he whispered. I held my father’s gaze. Sometimes he seemed to grow a little older just by looking at me and remembering. I stood up and hugged him quietly. He held me tight and when he burst into tears the anger and the pain he’d buried in his soul all those years gushed out like blood. I knew then, without being able to explain clearly why, that slowly, inexorably, my father had begun to die.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prisoner of Heaven

“Dis is bribery, is it?” he whispered. “This is taxation,”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses. Earth has also tidally locked the Moon, leaving it with identical periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around Earth. Wherever and whenever this happens, the locked moon shows only one face to its host planet.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry