John

“Even Sir Leicester’s gallantry has some trouble to keep pace with her. It would have more but that his other faithful ally, for better and for worse—the gout—darts into the old oak bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both legs. Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved, sir. Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by dying of their own family gout. It has come down through the illustrious line like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, “My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“The angiosperms include the oaks and the ash, the Parrotia and the baobab, the eucalyptus and the laurels, the palm trees and the rhododendrons. The angio-, or container part of their name, denotes the fact that they have a carpel: a fleshy, adapted leaf that folds around the ovaries, meaning that pollen has to penetrate through some of the plant before it can produce seed. This was an extraordinarily powerful mechanism, because it gave the female plant—which here simply means the plant that will produce seeds and is therefore investing most nutrients in the potential offspring—the power of selection, a dogma-defying ability to determine its offspring’s DNA and therefore influence evolution.”
― Harriet Rix, The Genius of Trees: How They Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World

“We were an irreligious crowd”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House