Blackthorn

"Suddenly I understood what all the fuss over kissing a girl was about."

Piñon jumped onto the bed and mounted his girlfriend, a stuffed alligator."

"We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most."

Stephen Hawking, quoted in The Quark and the Jaguar. Adventures in the simple and complex.

Maggie Smith, 1934 - 2024

"I asked my boys to search and sort flints in the spoil heap by the mine. They had high hopes of finding implements, a broken arrow head at least. All they found, in fact, was the skeletal lower arm of a child. Marks on the hinge joint of the ulna suggested that it had been removed by surgery of some kind. We sent the bones across to Carter for some tests - and then we entertained ourselves that night, in the darkness of our tents, inventing reasons why the arm was there, and what the fate had been of that child's other bones."

"I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem."