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“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Reality,' sa molesworth 2, 'is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder'.”
― Geoffrey Willans, Whizz for Atomms

“It's the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other’s company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars