“As the captain of the Yale swimming team stood besides the pool, still dripping after his laps, and listened to Bob Moses, the team’s second-best freestyler, he didn’t know what shocked him more—the suggestion or the fact that it was Moses who was making it.” Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

“Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth.

“Not long after they heard the first clink of iron, the boys and girls in the cornfield would have been able to smell the grownups’ bodies, perhaps even before they saw the double line coming around the bend.” Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.” Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1.

“People’s lives—their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences—begin at different times.” Stephen King, The Dark Half.

“From far-northwest Greenland to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, people hail the new moon—a time for singing and praying, eating and drinking.” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know his World and Himself.

“All parents keep secrets from their children.” Scott Turow, Ordinary Heroes.

“Among the most rewarding traits of perennials is the fact that they come up unprompted year after year to offer the garden masses and highlight of color in uninterrupted but ever-changing patterns from April to November.” James Underwood Crockett, Perennials.

“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a  hollow iron bar.” Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman.

“In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton’s laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion.” Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do.

“Death is my beat.” Michael Connelly, The Poet.