Julia

“The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning

“If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.”
― Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

“(...) an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary journey.”
― Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke