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1 " To her despair was added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of every thinker who, venturing an inquisitive finger beneath the velvet of a throne, comes upon the coarse pinewood . . . And then it was she fell victim to a still more painful disquiet. The dead man they had just carted off, like a lump of matter no longer of any use, made it hideously plain how closely hospitals resemble factories. Under the scalpel, living flesh is treated there like wood under the plane or steel under the rolling-mill. "
― Maurice Renard , The Hands Of Orlac
2 " Oh! The melancholy, the fantastic melancholy of that invention that freezes sounds, just as Francois Rabelais had so clownishly imagined! Was it necessary that, no sooner born, the most seductive of discoveries, which fixes in life life's most ephemeral voices, should enter into the service of death? "
3 " The dinner-table is often the terrain of critical conversations, for it is there one has the better of one's interlocutor. There is no escape without scandal, there is no turning aside without self-betrayal. To invite a person to dinner is to place them under observation. Every dining-room is a temporary prison where politeness chains the guests to the laden board. "
4 " The young woman had read a good many novels, andshe had seen a good many films; this education by newspaper, serial and film had, in a thousand and one ways, blunted her sensibilities to the wonderful; reading about and seeing impossible events had prepared her to be un-astonished by the most improbable phenomena. All the same, her terror had brought with it a stupefaction, and the doctor's voice drew her from a species of torpor that came close to swooning. "
5 " The emergency services had not yet been organized.Rosine could go where she wished. Her high heels made her stumble in the darkness, over the stones, the frozen clods of soil, over the tussocks of grass, the countless obstacles of the rough earth. She was shivering with cold and thought she might be about to faint away amid the sinister din of the disaster. A fearful chaos was becoming apparent. Rude forms stood erect, the silhouette of a heap of rails. Lanterns, miserable yellow stars, circulated hither and thither. There were even household oil-lamps to be seen, with which the wind dealt harshly. And, all the time, people were running ... "
6 " But Rosine had read books . . . so many books ... Her over-excited memory was filling her mind with terrifying images . . . The very excess of her imaginings forced her to take a grip on herself. "
