We've been foodies as long as we've been farmers

Constant harvesting of the grain encouraged the plants to grow larger and more abundantly, so maize quickly became plentiful - farmers generally got a healthy return on their invested labour. Crucially, maize is a rich carbohydrate that gives you a rapid energy hit. Unfortunately, it is also pretty stodgy, and so from very early on farmers cultivated an ingenious accompaniment - the indigenous chilli. It has limited nutritional value, but it is uniquely able to liven up dull carbohydrates - and its development and widespread use across Central America is a resounding demonstration that we've been foodies as long as we've been farmers.

N. MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 objects (2010), 47 [9: Maya maize god statue]

A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue

I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory

V. Nabokov, quoted in H. Gold, 'Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40', The Paris Review 41 (1967). <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov> Retrieved 27.3.14

The existence of Simla was itself a comment on the astonishing complacency of the British in India

The existence of Simla was itself a comment on the astonishing complacency of the British in India at this period: for seven months of the year, the Company ruled one-fifth of mankind from a Himalayan village overlooking the borders of Tibet and connected to the outside world by a road little better than a goat path. 

W. Dalrymple, Return of a King (2013), 130

There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach

There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach
But alas! I cannot swim

Khushal Khan, quoted in W. Dalrymple, Return of a King (2013), 17
Though the endnotes sadly tell us that 'many scholars doubt the authenticity of this celebrated couplet'

The sea has become the land, in that it is now the usual medium of transit: not barrier but corridor

The discovery of the sea roads necessitated a radical re-imagining of the history of Europe. Try it yourself, now. Invert the mental map you have of Britain, Ireland and western Europe. Turn it inside out. Blank out the land interiors of these countries - consider them featureless, as you might have previously considered the sea. Instead, populate the western and northern eaters with paths and tracks: a travel system that joins port to port, island to island, headland to headland,  river mouth to river mouth. The sea has become the land, in that it is now the usual medium of transit: not barrier but corridor.

R. MacFarlane, The Old Ways (2012), 92-3

One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste

'One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste,' said the Emperor Karl, last of the Hapsburg Emperors of Austria-Hungary - a mistaken opinion which was one of the contributory causes of his own downfall and the disintegration of an empire which had endured (in various forms) for a millennium.

L. Hughes - Hallet, The Pike (2013), 382

And the newspapers someone dares to be happy because there were no human victims!

He [Nietzsche] was an aesthete, and not only in a green-carnation-wearing, stained-glass fancying sense of the word. He was one who valued beauty far higher than justice or human kindness, D'Annunzio would respond in the same spirit to the collapse of the campanile in Venice's Piazza San Marco in 1902.He was prostrated by grief, weeping, and pacing from room to room all day, unable to work. 'And the newspapers someone dares to be happy because there were no human victims!' To him the pain and death of his fellow beings would have been insignificant, by comparison with the loss of an harmonious architectural ensemble. 'Innumerable human victims would not be enough to compensate.'

L. Hughes - Hallet, The Pike (2013), 237