Nathan Cull

“While Nigel chattered away about the ghoulish features of dying which interested him, I grew melancholy at the half-finished things which a death persuades you to focus on.”
― Julian Barnes, Metroland

“We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain. I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy: in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there is no discrepancy. Your soldierly stride, your lordly port - these will not do. You stand too straight, your looks are too high, too confident. The cares of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do not droop the chin, they do not depress the high level of the eye-glance, they do not put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them in slouching body and unsure step. It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that do these things. You must learn the trick; you must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression, insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go to pieces at the first hut we stop at.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“A nameless pimple in the middle of nowhere. how many of those there have been. How difficult they would be to find after the war. A barren hump of unmemorable ground. It became important to a few human beings for a few hours of a November afternoon. Some of them lay on and about it in holes: some others wanted it. It wouldn't matter a great deal in the eternity of time who any of them were. Nor, in the larger pattern of conflict, why the hill was so desirable.”
― Fred Majdalany, Patrol