From Plum Island, a 1997 thriller by Nelson DeMille:
“Can you describe to the duties of the Gordons?”
“Yes… They were involved mostly with… genetic research. Genetic alteration of viruses to make them unable to cause disease, but able to stimulate the body’s immune system.”
“A vaccine?” Beth asked.
“Yes, a new type of vaccine. Much safer than using a weakened virus.”
“She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.”
— Zero History (William Gibson)
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means the “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
— Isaac Asimov
From a 2016 essay (My Biological Clock Can’t Tick Fast Enough) by Sari Botton:
“People sometimes commend me on how “brave” it was for us to not have children. I laugh, because to my mind, I arrived at it in just about the most cowardly way: I lucked into childlessness (if having a defective uterus can be considered luck). Deep down I didn’t want to have children, but I kept limping toward motherhood anyway, because I thought I should want them until, in the end, my anatomy dictated my destiny.”
“They weren’t loud people and didn’t even sound all that angry, really. This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to “I am fucking freezing.”
“Me too,” her husband said. “It’s cold as shit in here.” Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit.”
— The Best of Me (David Sedaris)