Ioana

“The subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“Stabbity, stabbity, stab. That will be two dollars.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘that’s not how assassination works. You do not charge the corpse.’ So she thinks about it and says, ‘My friend Keith,’ (another small munchkin salutes) ‘he’s from the Guild of Alchemists and will bring you alive again for three dollars.’ So with rigor mortis setting in, I stuck my hand in my pocket and gave them some of the fake convention money and then she smiled sweetly and said, ‘And for five dollars, I won’t kill you again.’ It was amazing to see how this Ankh-Morpork system evolved during the con.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell