Megan Hex

“The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical level: Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It’s still only ever background music.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, The Intruders

“I looked for the clock over the front desk, which is made from the taxidermied body of a cuckoo and resembles a dad joke given flesh.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Over two thousand Byzantine manuscripts devoted to medical works survive in European libraries. A third of these contain works by a single author such as the second-century Galen of Pergamon; the remaining manuscripts have selections from different classical and Byzantine medical writers. In this second group of manuscripts, scattered among the selections culled from treatises by well-known physicians, are many anonymous antidotaria—lists of pharmaceutical treatments for specific diseases, some as long as eighty-five folios.”
― Timothy S. Miller, Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West

“We put our feet on the hard ground, take in the night air and look around as if this whole place has sprung up for us and us alone. Not just the house, but the ancient trees, the watching insects, the stars and even the moon. But they have all lived without us for lifetimes that make our own look like the blink of the eye. The house, with its strict walls and severe lines, is shamefully out of place, something modern dropped down somewhere as soft as feathers, as twisty and spreading as willow roots. How do the trees and the insects and the stars and the moon like it, I wonder? How do they like to have to share their secret lives with us now?”
― Hester Fox, The Witch of Willow Hall