Stylistic Variance

...you were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four Five and Six....

He loved green turtles and hawk-bills with their elegance and speed and their great value and he had a friendly contempt for the huge, stupid loggerheads, yellow in their armour-plating, strange in their lovemaking, and happily eating the Portugese men-of-war with their eyes shut.

He had no mysticism about turtles although he had gone in turtle boats for many years. He was sorry for them all, even the great trunk backs that were as long as the skiff and weighed a ton. Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.

The Old Man and the Sea; Ernest Hemmingway

In the prose story The Tragical History of Titus Andronicus, the Goths are said to have invaded Italy under their king, "Tottilius."

Actually, there was a king of the Ostrogoths, of nearly that name, who fought in Italy. He was Totila, who ruled from 541 to 552.

Here is what happened. Although the Germanic tribes had settled the Western provinces of the Roman Empire, the Easter provinces remained intact and were ruled from Constantinople. In 527 Justininan became Roman Emperor in Constantinople, and was determined to reconquer the West. In 535 he sent his great general, Belisarius, to Italy, and with that began a twenty-year (not a mere ten-year) war of Roman and Goth, in which the Romans were eventually victorious.

Belisarius won initial victories, but the Goths rallied when Totila became king. Belisarius was recalled and replaced with another general, Narses (a eunuch, the only one of importance in military hisstory), who finally defeated Totila in 552 and completed the conquest of Italy in 556. In the Tragical History Titus Andronicus was a governor of Greece and came from Greece to rescue Italy, and that fits too.

Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare; Isaac Asimov

They're more concerned with mainatining their precious power base and promising the moon to get reelected. I'm sick to death of their endless, stupid committee hearings. Sick to death of their lack of guts in standing for unpopular issues, and spending the nation into bankruptcy. The two-party system has become a stagnant swamp of fraud and criminal promises. As with communism, the great experiment in democracy is withering from corruption. Who cares a damn if the oceans die? Well, by God, I do.

Saharah; Clive Cussler

So many times you have expected the worst and life has delivered your expectations flawlessly. Do you see, within these examples, the depth of your power in directing your scenes? Emotional healing does not mean dwelling upon the would; it means looking at the world through unwounded eyes.

Messages From Your Angels; Doreen Virtue

I grew up among slow talkers, men, in particular, who dropped words a few at a time like beans in a hill, and when I got to Minneapolis, where people took a Lake Wobegon comma to mean the end of the story, I couldn't speak a whole sentence in company and was considered not too bright, so I enrolled in a speech course taught by Orville Sand, the founder of reflexive relaxology, a self-hypnotic technique that enabled a person to speak up to three hundred words per minute. It was hard to understand him. He'd be rattling on about relaxology one moment and then he was into photography, his father, the Baltimore Orioles, wheat germ, birth and death, central heating, the orgasm- which was satisfying for him, but which left me in the dust, so I quit, having only gotten up to about eighty-five. And after a few weeks, I was back to about ten or eleven.

Lake Wobegon Days; Garrison Keillor

For all our so-called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it's still the year 300,000 before Christ down there. While we've paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other's countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet.

The Foghorn; Ray Bradbury

"Hey, look," said Higby, "Old Whaleboat."

The man approaching was Ron Ziegler, the President's Press Secretary, whose Signal Corps code name was "Whaleboat," a name which drove the Californian up the wall. Almost his first act in the White House had been to call the Signal Corps and demand that he be issued a more suitable designation. To the delight of the White House staff, I had quietly instructed the Signal Corps to stand firm. It was a private joke we played on Ron, whose constant preoccupation with his "image" always amused us.

The Ends of Power; H. R. Haldeman

(Everyday I Write The Book; Elvis Costello)