Her foot had never touched the ground. Not even her small, gilded sandals had touched it, not the floor where the mortals walked. Everywhere she went, slaves scurried to lay mats of moven gold for her to walk on.

(Polly B. Johnson, Fresh Blood, aus "Sword and Sorceress III, 1986")

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder about how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words. Yet there is
the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, ravelling nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here,
here is the point where it all began ...

(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, 1996)
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Few crimes make us fear for the evolution of our species. I was watching one right now.

(John Burdett, Bangkok Haunts, 2007)
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Wer liegt im Grab eines Dichters? Der Dichter jedenfalls nicht, so viel ist gewiß.

(Cees Nooteboom, Tumbas, 2006)
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Letztes Jahr im November hat ein Buch mein Leben gerettet.

(Nicolas Barreau, Das Lächeln der Frauen, 2010)
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It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead.

(Joanne Harris, The Lollipop Shoes, 2007)
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I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling.

(Raymond Chandler, Goldfish, 1933 - 1939)
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