Cyanide Quotes

Did I mention I've finally decided on a nickname for you?" "I didn't know you were looking." Well, I've given the matter some serious thought." "And what have you come up with?" "Cookie," I anounced proudly. Xavier scrunched up his face. "No way." "You don't like it? What about Bumblebee?" "Worse." "Snookie-Wookie?" "Do you have any cyanide?" "Well, some of us are just a bit hard to please.

After losing my job, I felt the only options available to me were razors, cyanide, or a shot to the face, until Renaldo, being the good friend that he is, reminded me how to tie a noose.


Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.

Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.

May I offer you something? A small glass of cyanide?

Doctor, what could you prescribe for Charlemund?” The doctor looked down his nose at the unconscious form of the arch-diocel. “Arsenic?” “Now, really. Something to give him a quality headache and a great deal of memory loss.” “Cyanide.

Peach pits are poisonous. This is not a mistake. Girlhood is growing fruit around cyanide. It will never be your for swallowing.

He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.

If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.

I'd take cyanide no problem if it was that or throwing a cat out in the street, even a moth-eaten, mangy, caterwauling pain in the ass! I'd rather have the thing in bed with me than see it suffer on my account...though when it comes to human beings, I'm only interested in the sick...the ones who can stand up are nothing but mounds of vice and spite...I don't get mixed up in their schemes...

Sanctified cyanide Super-quick arsenic Higgledy-piggledy Into the Soup. Put out the mourning lamps Call for coffin clamps Teach them to trifle with Flavia de Luce!

Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes-they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.... The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don't give a damn.

There would be no dressing up as a maid. No cyanide slipped into his crystal glass of mineral water. The Fuhrer’s death was to be a loud, screaming thing. A broadcast of blood over the Reichssender.

There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart

You've got to stop letting women slip drugs into your mouth, Dex, it's unhygienic. And dangerous. One day it'll be a cyanide capsule.

How little you might know of a person after living in the same house with them!

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...

Cyanide is natural. So is arsenic.

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Apricot stones contain cyanide,’ he replies drily. ‘The death cap mushroom has a fifty per cent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden where if you simply sat under it for ten minutes then you’d be dead.’ Job done: she bins the tablets. I ask him about that plant over a colonoscopy later. ‘Water lily.

Any advice I might give a depressed person comes in the form of cyanide, and usually is a bit hard for them to swallow.

If somebody offered me Cyanide, my only question would be, Is it organic? Because organic is always the healthier option.

Some men call her cyanide For she'll cause and take your pain. To others she's the devil Or the quest for true love's bane, And, to those less lucky, She's called their ball and chain.

Potassium cyanide," says the talent wrangler as she leans over to pick up a paper napkin off the floor. "Found naturally in the cassava or manioc roots native to Africa, used to tint architectural blueprints in the form of the deep-blue pigment known as Prussian blue. Hence the shade 'cyan' blue.

Stop playing the part of the glib martyr. You’re just trying to make cyanide out of 7-Up.

Sorry." he said, rubbing his temples. "Do you have any Tylenol?" "Nope, sorry. Your doctor's appointment is today right?" "Yeah." "Here take this." Jenna rummaged in her purse and took out two tablets. Robbie squinted at them, then tossed them down with the rest of his soda. "What was that?" "Cyanide." said Sharon, and we laughed. "Actually, it was Midol." Jenna said. Matt whooped with laughter as Robbie gaped at her in dismay. "It'll really help." Jenna insisted. "It's what I take for my headaches." "Oh man." Robbie shook his head. I was almost doubled over with laughter. "Look at it this way," said Cal brightly. "You won't get that awful bloated feeling." "You'll feel pretty all day." suggested Matt, laughing so hard, he had to wipe his eyes.

Do you like mysteries?” I nodded. I think if she’d asked me whether I liked arsenic or cyanide on toast I would have given her the same answer. “Are

Here’s the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It’s a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It’s a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It’s the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed is as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he has hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

Now, even if he and Dr B made their decision, D didn't know if he had the rigour to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional disposition. It was absurdley like the argument in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decide, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.

My own feelings are a hedge of briars that I can’t bring myself to touch. There are so many unhappy people, I just don’t want to find out that I am one of them. They walk among us, they touch you, and you become them. Introspection is like cyanide. Life is fine this way, ignorance is easy, I do what is easy. Doesn’t that make the most sense?

And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern:“they almost always have crystals in their heart.

Too many of us treat guns with genial familiarity. Guns should give us the heebie-jeebies. They are killing machines. That is all they are. We should dread them the way we dread cancer and cyanide and electric chairs.

Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago...

Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes - they have to reassure about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.

religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")

Oh, yes, sir.” Betty’s eyes sparkled with the pleasure of public disaster. “Wasn’t it dreadful?

If you were a book, I’d read you, touch you, look at you every day and never get bored.

When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?

On listening to Gute Nacht Aus Schuberts Winterreise Great music has much the same effect upon humans as cyanide, I managed to think: It paralyzes the respiratory system.

Yesterday was my last day at work. My coworkers were so sad they all pitched in and bought me a one-way ticket to Seattle, and a bottle of cyanide in case I get thirsty.

I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing. I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.

And I say no. The problem is the light, the dim light down here. Cupped in the palm of my hand, the cyanide and the wood pill, I can't tell which is which. What's sex and what's death—I can't tell the difference. I ask which one to give her. And Mr. Bacardi leans in to look, both of us breathing hot, damp air into my open hand.

Iris was too languid and too used to Mrs. Drake’s discursive style to inquire why the mention of Dr. Gaskell should have reminded her aunt of the local grocer, though had she done so, she would have received the immediate response: “Because the grocer’s name is Cranford, my dear.” Aunt Lucilla’s reasoning was always crystal clear to herself.

Cyanide. On ice with a twist of lime. Or water. But I’m not budging on the lime.” Lyon, Jennifer (2013-02-22). The Proposition (The Plus One Chronicles) (Kindle Location 1365). Jennifer Lyon Books. Kindle Edition.

Apricot stones contain cyanide,’ he replies drily. ‘The death cap mushroom has a fifty per cent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden where if you simply sat under it for ten minutes then you’d be dead.’ Job done: she bins the tablets. I ask him about that

O VENENO ARDENTE DO DESGOSTO. THE WHITE HOT POISON OF ANGER. When others make us angry at them- at their shamelessness, injustice, inconsideration- then they exercise power over us, they proliferate and gnaw at our soul, then anger is like a white-hot poison that corrods all mild, noble and balanced feelings and robs us of sleep. Sleepless, we turn on the light and are angry at the anger that has lodged like a succubus who sucks us dry and debilitates us. We are not only furious at the damage, but also that it develops in us all by itself, for while we sit on the edge of the bed with aching temples, the distant catalyst remains untouched by the corrosive force of the anger that eats at us. On the empty internal stage bathed in the harsh light of mute rage, we perform all by ourselves a drama with shadow figures and shadow words we hurl against enemies in helpless rage we feel as icy blazing fire in our bowels. And the greater our despair that is only a shadow play and not a real discussion with the possibility of hurting the other and producing a balance of suffering, the wilder the poisonous shadows dance and haunt us even in the darkest catacombs of our dreams. (We will turn the tables, we think grimly, and all night long forge words that will produce in the other the effect of a fire bomb so that now he will be the one with the flames of indignation raging inside while we, soothed by schadenfreude, will drink our coffee in cheerful calm.) What could it mean to deal appropriately with anger? We really don't want to be soulless creatures who remain thoroughly indifferent to what they come across, creatures whose appraisals consist only of cool, anemic judgments and nothing can shake them up because nothing really bothers them. Therefore, we can't seriously wish not to know the experience of anger and instead persist in an equanimity that wouldn't be distinguished from tedious insensibility. Anger also teaches us something about who we are. Therefore this is what I'd like to know: What can it mean to train ourselves in anger and imagine that we take advantage of its knowledge without being addicted to its poison? We can be sure that we will hold on to the deathbed as part of the last balance sheet- and this part will taste bitter as cyanide- that we have wasted too much, much too much strength and time on getting angry and getting even with others in a helpless shadow theater, which only we, who suffered impotently, knew anything about. What can we do to improve this balance sheet? Why did our parents, teachers and other instructors never talk to us about it? Why didn't they tell something of this enormous significance? Not give us in this case any compass that could have helped us avoid wasting our soul on useless, self-destructive anger?

At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t.

If the young man ate candy, the wrangler says, that's probably what's kept him alive so long. Glucose is a natural antidote to cyanide poisoning. Based on anecdotal evidence, glucose binds with the cyanide to produce less toxic compounds.

Apricot stones contain cyanide,” he replies drily. “The death cap mushroom has a fifty percent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden that if you simply sat under it for ten minutes, you’d be dead.” Job done; she tosses the tablets. I ask him about that plant over a colonoscopy later. “Water lily.

On Jones’s instruction, Larry Schacht ordered one pound of sodium cyanide, enough for 1,800 lethal doses. It cost $8.85.

Escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide

Suicide is like a little cyanide capsule in my pocket, just in case the enemy comes too close—always there, but only to be used when facing seemingly insurmountable odds.

You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me.

I say it's extremism to decimate pine forests, denude the desert grasslands, seed the steppe with cyanide bombs, send Bull Hogs into pinyon-juniper stands and turn birds to red mist. Ecosaboteurs destroy inanimate objects. The real extremists among us destroy life for profit.

She couldn’t send Billy out for ice cream or strawberries, since the atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and the nearest strawberries and ice cream were millions of light years away.

Before I drift off, I hear a pup say through the thin trailer wall, “Why does it smell like wood?” “That’s Cadoc Collins,” Rosie murmurs in reply. “He smells nice.” “So does cyanide,” she says.

But not even ardent nut lovers eat wild almonds, of which a few dozen contain enough cyanide (the poison used in Nazi gas chambers) to kill us. The forest is full of many other plants deemed inedible.

During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose.

There is no thrill like the thrill of discovery; no life like the life of a mining camp in the days of its youth. Nevada had known them in full and overflowing measure. The salt of the sea in the blood of a sailor is but a weak and insipid condiment compared with the solution of cyanide, sage and silicate in the blood of the prospector.

Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes—they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.

I'd like to give these detective story writers a course of routine work. They'd soon learn how most things are untraceable and nobody ever notices anything anywhere!

When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.

Pies are so much fun to make—and so simple! All it takes to make a tender, flaky crust is the right amount of vegetable shortening, cut into flour with a sprinkle of cold water, and just a pinch of salt. Cherries have the right sweet-to-tart taste—and are also a good source of poison! Just crush the pits or stems. There you’ll find prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide: easy to sprinkle into both the filling and the crust. How sweet it is!

With a shock Iris realized suddenly that it was the first time in her life she had ever thought about Rosemary. Thought about her, that is, objectively, as a person. She had always accepted Rosemary without thinking about her. You didn’t think about your mother or your father or your sister or your aunt. They just existed, unquestioned, in those relationships. You didn’t think about them as people. You didn’t ask yourself, even, what they were like.

Butterflies have often been used as a metaphor for freedom. Turning every single hobby into a hustle is akin to walking around with a cyanide-filled jar to kill and pin every butterfly you see. Sometimes it’s better to just enjoy the chaos of your creative flow without trying to capture and catalyze it.

Whenever I’m a little blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.

Spittle flew from Jango’s lips as he shouted at the man in a woman’s voice that sounded like it was made of cyanide and sugar that had been laced with the patter of blood dripping on an abattoir floor, “This is the truth about The Killer, ain’t it baby? You’re just a big ol’ bag of screams under all that big, bad muscle, ain’t you?

فقد أراد أن يضع حدا لعلاقتهما .. فلماذا ؟ هل أراد أن يفعل هذا لصالحها وفائدتها حقا كما ذكر لها ! ولكن .. أليس هذا مايقوله كل رجل حين يريد أن يقطع علاقته بالمرأة التي تحبه ؟

Ego is like cyanide. Instantly kills dialogue. Always needs to be kept satisfied.

the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-

I was scared—with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I’d ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered lightbulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out—or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

A rosewater smell from the box summoned, instantly, a dictatorial woman with a tight bun, hectoring him with questions. The cut, the buttons, the pockets, the collar. But most of all: the blue. Chosen in haste from a wall of fabrics: not an ordinary blue. Peacock? Lapis? Nothing gets close. Medium but vivid, moderately lustrous, definitely bold. Somewhere between ultramarine and cyanide salts, between Vishnu and Amon, Israel and Greece, the logos of Pepsi and Ford. In a word: bright. He loved whatever self had chosen it and after that wore it constantly. Even Freddy approved: “You look like someone famous!” And he does. Finally, at his advanced age, he has struck the right note. He looks good, and he looks like himself.

Cyanide,” I explained. “You can’t kill him with that.” Curran grimaced. “It’s not for him. It’s for me.” They stared at me. “People were dying,” I said. “He was laughing, and all I could do was to sit tight and be safe.” Curran growled. “You think it’s easy for me?” “No. But you’re used to it. You have experience with responsibility for people’s lives. I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to die for me. I’m up to my knees in blood as is.” “I had to send three patrols out,” Curran said. “Because of you. None of them died, but they could have. All because you couldn’t stand to not be the center of attention for a few minutes.” “You’re an asshole.” “Fuck you.” I started sniffing. “What the hell is that stink? Oh, wait a minute, it’s you. You reek. Did you dine on skunk or is that your natural odor?” “That’s enough,” Mahon roared, startling both of us into silence. “You’re acting like children. Curran, you’ve missed your meditation, and you need one. Kate, there is a punching bag in your room. Make use of it.” “Why do I have to punch the bag while he meditates?” I mumbled on the way out. “Because he breaks the bags when he punches them,” Mahon said.

Workplace bullying acts as silent cyanide; often it’s done in private. When does envy occur? When somebody pulls a little further ahead, like the tall poppy. Someone is favored by the boss, he or she does better work, the person has more energy, nicer clothes, a nicer car, or is perceived as better looking for example. It could be a whole bunch of reasons and the target often has no clue—the target is the last to know. Envy is the driver, and envy has more to do with the bully than the target. It’s not the target’s fault, yet targets often drop their own needs and respond by taking ownership for the bully’s feelings of low self-worth. 

...in the final analysis one is incapable of total self-annihilation, either mental or physical, not even having taken cyanide, for even then it's the poison, or the rope, or the water, or the bullet that does the job...

As the concert goers left the hall, the music of the end of the world still ringing in their ears, they filed out past children dressed in their Hitler Youth uniforms who had been assigned to helpfully hold out baskets filled with cyanide capsules for the crowd.

Colonel Race was not good at small talk and might indeed have posed as the model of a strong silent man so beloved by an earlier generation of novelists.

Race nodded. He had only met George’s wife once. He had thought her a singularly lovely nitwit—but certainly not a melancholic type.

these twitterers can tell one a lot if one just lets them—twitter!

He began the interview by asking what my hobbies were. "Incunabula and intercourse, sir." It slipped out and wasn't even accurate; I'd had little experience of one and couldn't afford the other.

The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had th eopportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remeber, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. "And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart.

Oh, quite so. Count them both in as possibles. She for jealousy. He for his career. Divorce would have dished that. Not that divorce means as much as it used to, but in his case it would have meant the antagonism of the Kidderminster clan.

Claudette looks down at the thing in her hand. She turns it one way and the other. It is a packet of Italian coffee, half used, left behind. Innocuous enough in itself but in Claudette’s hands, this particular morning, it is as dangerous as cyanide. She isn’t going to sniff it, no, she isn’t. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt such a thing. Just a whiff of those smoky, dark, aromatic granules – heated up they always were, at length, lovingly, every morning in this kitchen, for all the years he lived here, the way he would stand waiting for them to brew, looking out of that window, that robe of his loose over his pyjamas, a child, usually, on his shoulder or his arm – would be enough to tip her over the edge. She isn’t going to do it. Certainly not. Then she does, of course. She removes the clip, she places it on the counter, she parts the top of the silver-and-red packet and she brings it to her face and she inhales, she inhales, she inhales.

Horrible house! Iris shivered. She hated it. A gracious well-built house, harmoniously furnished and decorated (Ruth Lessing was never at fault!). And curiously, frighteningly vacant. They didn’t live there. They occupied it. As soldiers, in a war, occupied some lookout post.

She was wearing a dress of some soft dark red material, and sitting as she was with the light from the long narrow window behind her, she reminded Kemp of a stained glass figure he had once seen in a cathedral abroad. The long oval of her face and the slight angularity of her shoulders helped the illusion. Saint Somebody or other, they had told him—but Lady Alexandra Farraday was no saint—not by a long way. And yet some of these old saints had been funny people from his point of view, not kindly ordinary decent Christian folk, but intolerant, fanatical, cruel to themselves and others.

He had known George Barton ever since the latter’s boyhood. Barton’s uncle had been a country neighbour of the Races. There was a difference of over twenty years between the two men. Race was over sixty, a tall, erect, military figure, with sunburnt face, closely cropped iron-grey hair, and shrewd dark eyes.

So long as you didn’t expect her to talk. He thanked his stars he wasn’t married to her. Once you got used to all that perfection of face and form where would you be? She couldn’t even listen intelligently. The sort of girl who would expect you to tell her every morning at the breakfast table that you loved her passionately!

Five minutes later, a young man walking rapidly in the opposite direction pulled up short and stopped in front of Sandra. He exclaimed blithely: “I say, what luck! I wondered if I’d ever see you again.” His tone was so delighted that she blushed just a little. He stooped to the dog. “What a jolly little fellow. What’s his name?” “MacTavish.” “Oh, very Scotch.

Once you decide on the best poison for the termination, you must work out the correct concentration. For instance, I know that five milligrams of cetratranic acid dropped into a bell-jar with a single moth will take about three seconds to stun it. I know that seven milligrams will anaesthetize it and ten is enough to kill it, providing the moth does not weight more than 3.5 grams. I also know that to kill fifty moths you need five times the concentration or volume of killing fluid, but to kill seven thousand you'd need only two hundred times the concentration. I know that potassium chloride could never kill a larger moth and potassium sulphide would only ever be strong enough to anaesthetize it. I know that cyanide kills anything. But what I don't know right now is the precise amount I will need to kill Vivien.

What was the point of all the odd questions he was continually shooting at her, Iris? Wasn’t there something very queer about George lately? The odd fuddled look he had in the evenings! Lucilla attributed it to a glass or so too much of port. Lucilla would! No, there was something queer about George lately. He seemed to be labouring under a mixture of excitement interlarded with great spaces of complete apathy when he sunk in a coma.

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. ... The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc. ... I did not think I investigated. ... I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else. ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded. ... There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy. [Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.]

He was going to succeed. As a first test of will, he determined to master his stammer. He practised speaking slowly, with a slight hesitation between every word. And in time his efforts were crowned with success. He no longer stammered. In school he applied himself to his lessons. He intended to have education. Education got you somewhere. Soon his teachers became interested, encouraged him. He won a scholarship. His parents were approached by the educational authorities—the boy had promise.

Colby was quietly shocked to find Tate not only at his door the next morning, but smiling. He was expecting an armed assault following their recent telephone conversation. “I’m here with a job offer.” Colby’s dark eyes narrowed. “Does it come with a cyanide capsule?” he asked warily. Tate clapped the other man on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about the way I’ve treated you. I haven’t been thinking straight. I’m obliged to you for telling me the truth about Cecily.” “You know the baby’s yours, I gather?” Tate nodded. “I’m on my way to Tennessee to bring her home,” he replied. Colby’s eyes twinkled. “Does she know this?” “Not yet. I’m saving it for a surprise.” “I imagine you’re the one who’s going to get the surprise,” Colby informed him. “She’s changed a lot in the past few weeks.” “I noticed.” Tate leaned against the wall near the door. “I’ve got a job for you.” “You want me to go to Tennessee?” Colby murmured dryly. “In your dreams, Lane,” Tate returned. “No, not that. I want you to head up my security force for Pierce Hutton while I’m away.” Colby looked around the room. “Maybe I’m hallucinating.” “You and my father,” Tate muttered, shaking his head. “Listen, I’ve changed.” “Into what?” “Pay attention. It’s a good job. You’ll have regular hours. You can learn to sleep without a gun under your pillow. You won’t lose any more arms.” He added thoughtfully, “I’ve been a bad friend. I was jealous of you.” “But why?” Colby wanted to know. “Cecily is special. I look out for her, period. There’s never been a day since I met her when she wasn’t in love with you, or a time when I didn’t know it.” Tate felt warmth spread through his body at the remark. “I’ve given her hell. She may not feel that way, now.” “You can’t kill love,” Colby said heavily. “I know. I’ve tried.” Tate felt sorry for the man. He didn’t know how to put it into words. Colby shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve learned to live with my ghosts, thanks to that psychologist Cecily pushed me into seeing.” He scowled. “She keeps snakes, can you imagine? I used to see mine crawling out of whiskey bottles, but hers are real.” “Maybe she’s allergic to fur,” Tate pointed out. Colby chuckled. “Who knows. When do I start?” he added. “Today.” He produced a mobile phone and dialed a number. “I’m sending Colby Lane over. He’s my relief while I’m away. If you have any problems, report them to him.” He nodded as the person on the other end of the line replied in the affirmative. He closed up the phone. “Okay, here’s what you need to do…

From the day of their marriage she had realized that he did not love her in the same way as she loved him. But she thought it possible that he was actually incapable of such a love. That power of loving was her own unhappy heritage. To care with a desperation, an intensity that was, she knew, unusual among women! She would have died for him willingly; she was ready to lie for him, scheme for him, suffer for him! Instead she accepted with pride and reserve the place he wanted her to fill. He wanted her cooperation, her sympathy, her active and intellectual help. He wanted of her, not her heart, but her brains, and those material advantages which birth had given her.

know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire. I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having wounded him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as so many others have been over the years, by his engaging intensity. We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced. I liked him. When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people of the century. He had launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating. After I had deflected his suggestion that I write a biography of him, I heard from him every now and then. At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book. When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a book event in Palo Alto and

If I talk about the Loud family now, will all of you know who I mean? I mean a family of prosperous human beings in California, whose last name is Loud. I suggest to you that the Louds were healthy Earthlings who had everything but a religion in which they could believe. There was nothing to tell them what they should want, what they should shun, what they should do next. Socrates told us that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. The Louds demonstrated that the morally unstructured life is a clunker, too. Christianity could not nourish the Louds. Neither could Buddhism or the profit motive of participation in the arts, or any other nostrum on America’s spiritual smorgasbord. So the Louds were dying before our eyes. Now is as good a time as any to mention White House Prayer Breakfasts, I guess. I think we all know now that religion of that sort is about as nourishing to the human spirit as potassium cyanide. We have been experimenting with it. Every guinea pig died. We are up to our necks in dead guinea pigs. The lethal ingredient in those breakfasts wasn’t prayer. And it wasn’t the eggs or the orange juice or the hominy grits. It was a virulent new strain of hypocrisy which did everyone in. If I have offended anyone here by talking of the need of a new religion, I apologize. I am willing to drop the word religion, and substitute three other words for it. Three other words are heartfelt moral code. We sure need such a thing, and it should be simple enough and reasonable enough for anyone to understand. The trouble with so many of the moral codes we have inherited is that they are subject to so many interpretations. We require specialists, historians and archaeologists and linguists and so on, to tell us where this or that idea may have come from, to suggest what this or that statement might actually mean. This is good news for hypocrites, who enjoy feeling pious, no matter what they do. It may be that moral simplicity is not possible in modern times. It may be that simplicity and clarity can come only from a new Messiah, who may never come. We can talk about portents, if you like. I like a good portent as much as anyone. What might be the meaning of the Comet Kahoutek, which was to make us look upward, to impress us with the paltriness of our troubles, to cleanse our souls with cosmic awe. Kahoutek was a fizzle, and what might this fizzle mean? I take it to mean that we can expect no spectacular miracles from the heavens, that the problems of ordinary human beings will have to be solved by ordinary human beings. The message of Kahoutek is: “Help is not on the way. Repeat: help is not on the way.