Lizzie

“A cock was strutting among his hens and gave a throaty, growling cluck as the intruders arrived. To make himself the centre of attraction, this great bird was pretending to find scraps of food and continuously calling his proteges to come and get it. They ran to him eagerly each time, only to return empty, but hen-like repeated the caper indefinitely. One white hen monotonously leapt at a hanging cabbage, pecking-off bits with each jump, like a little clockwork toy.”
― George Bellairs, The Dead Shall be Raised & Murder of a Quack

“What are you thinking about?" she asked him.
"Oh, my father again. When he was in the room, we all watched what we said. You wouldn't have liked him. He didn't care what people talked about as long as they spoke to the point. And a subject had to be completed before a new one was begun. Thoughts had to be ordered, like boxcars on a track. You could not, when describing a summer in Paris, begin to speak about Istanbul."
"What if you did?"
"He had very prominent knuckles and they would turn white. A change in subject until =he= thought it had terminated, offended some inner sense of progression. It enraged him. In a similar way, if you were a chemist you could not speak of atonality. You might say you liked it. But no judgments.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“A llama bit me once," said Leon in a dreamy voice. "I reluctantly took Benny to the children's zoo when he was small--it was supposed to be the thing to do--and a dirty demented llama reached over the fence and clampted its jaws on my hand. It was like being bitten by dirty laundry.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“I wasn't sure I found that particularly reassuring, but in the event of an attack I wasn't going to be as much use as Thomas 'Oh sorry, was that your Tiger Tank?' Nightingale.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes