"Objects contain the past, present and future, if we know how to trap their secrets."
—Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door (1977)

 

An illustration from an 1890 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Mostly he painted his pictures in the air."

Dedicated to Teresa Burritt.

"A rose is a rose but the rest sure ain't."
—Lou Riviezzo, Tans

"The surprising truth is that violent TV programs are not more popular but they are more profitable."
—Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon, Through the Media Looking Glass (1995)

"Look at the sun blazing there among the peaks, too blinding almost for our eyes.  See how he touches the mountaintops and how they dissolve into fire at his touch.  Some day, I tell you, he will burn as we please and spin at our command.  He will be our servant, our convenience, our instrument.  He will be the fire before our door, the light of our first home as we spread out our power and our blood farther and farther amidst the stars."
—H.G. Wells, "The World Set Free"

An illustration from a 1913 issue of Century Illustrated magazine.

"In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain[,] [e]ach one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to.  It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colorful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"The answer is simple:  find the Vacuum.”

—Giuliano Preparata, An Introduction to a Realistic Quantum Physics (2002)

A ghostly illustration from a 1902 issue of The Strand magazine.  The caption reads: "He said he wouldn't sit down; he'd prefer to flit up and down the room."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you really wouldn't have fun at my party."
—Sassy (1994)

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Scribner's magazine.  The caption reads: "Out of the night and the other world came into him the dead."

"Many men have forgotten how to play [handball], and some never knew how.  This may surprise you, but it is a solemn fact." —Charles Phelps Cushing, "What Can a Fat Man Do?" The World's Work, July 1916

Here's an illustration from a 1900 issue of The Strand magazine.  The caption reads: "I fell for evermore into the abyss of the sky."

photo by Cobalt 123

"The Markee observed, apropos of nothing in particular: 'Ha, ha!'"
—Puck, May 23, 1883

A traveler realizes "that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language . . . Thus the traveler spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters." —Vladimir Navokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"The world we live in is a world of effects; the realm of true causes is hidden.  If we should ever discover it we would be able to perform magic."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

An illustration from an 1897 issue of The Strand magazine.  The caption reads: "(To be continued.)"