"The past gathered out of the darkness where it had stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air."

- from John Williams' excellent Stoner (1965), pg. 16.

In another universe...

From the L.A. Times:

A hydrogen bomb would have fallen on North Carolina in 1961 but for one safety switch.

wolf-free islands off the coasts...

"Where attacks have been made on man by northern wolves, the animals have almost certainly been suffering from rabies, a disease which not infrequently affects them...

This behavior [i.e., healthy wolves refraining from attacking humans] is the more strange because wolves, although they normally eat carrion only when there is little alternative, readily unearth human corpses and devour them. This is well known from early records in countries such as Scotland, where cemeteries were removed to wolf-free islands off the coasts, and from reliable North American records. It is difficult to account for this behaviour in a predatory animal without entering realms of fantasy."

- from Richard Fiennes' fascinating The Order of Wolves (1976), pg. 19.