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1 " It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard. "
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
2 " Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the and of things inside it. Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assailAnd ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am,The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing— Each thought breaking always in another.All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in. "
3 " [Patricia Highsmith] was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn't her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her. It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn't know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room. "
― Andrew Wilson , Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
4 " The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out. The drought had persisted for over a month. "
― S. Rajaratnam , The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam
