Raymond Chandler
- The Long Goodbye
I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. Both parents dead, no brothers or sisters and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.
Thomas De Quincey
- Confessions of an English Opium Eater
The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams - a music of a preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march - of infinite calvalcades filing off - and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day - a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity.
Daniel Defoe
- A Journal of the Plague Year
It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return'd again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the Year 1663, whether they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus.
