Timelapsed Man

“They made a sweeping turn into Park Avenue and Herzog clutched the broken window handle. It wouldn’t open. But if it opened dust would pour in. They were demolishing and raising buildings. The avenue was filled with concrete-mixing trucks, smells of wet sand and powdery gray [sic] cement. Crashing, stamping pile-driving below, and, higher, structural steel, interminably and hungrily going up into the cooler, more delicate blue. Orange beams hung from the cranes like straws. But down in the street where the buses were spurting the poisonous exhaust of cheap fuel, and the cars were crammed together, it was stifling, grinding, the racket of machinery and the desperately purposeful crowds - horrible!”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Cuss went straight up to the village to Bunting the vicar.
"Am I mad?" Cuss began abruptly, as he entered the shabby little study. "Do I look like an insane person?"
"What's happened?" said the vicar, putting the ammonite on the loose sheets of his forthcoming sermon.”
― H G Wells, The Invisible Man

“He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most expensive sort, tears of the first water.”
― H.G. Wells, The Soul Of A Bishop

“The nearest watch-tower, at which the driver pointed, was sharply silhouetted. It was closer than the other had been and had no higher hills behind it, only the clearing sky with its suggestion of of pale gold, now perhaps employed in the propaganda services of the people’s free republic. All the fences, designed to keep those people feeling free and happy without a chance of break-out, could be seen from this vantage point. It was as if the landscape was now within the brain of some giant power lunatic, with barbed and electrified wire running towards nerve ends, watch-towers completing the optical system.”
― J.B. Priestley, The Shapes of Sleep