La Paloma Azul

- The Modern Jazz Quartet with Paul Desmond, Christmas, 1971.

"His life followed a familiar pattern. There were in Russia scores of noblemen who gambled, got drunk and wenched in their youth, who married and had a flock of children, who settled down on their estates, looked after their property, rode horseback and hunted; and there were not a few who shared Tolstoy's liberal principles and, distressed at the ignorance of the peasants, their dreadful poverty and the squalor in which they lived, sought to ameliorate their lot. The only thing that distinguished him from all of them was that during this time he wrote two of the world's greatest novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. How this came about is a mystery as inexplicable as that the son and heir of a stodgy Sussex squire should have written the Ode to the West Wind."

- W. Somerset Maugham, "War and Peace", 1948.

"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.

"All that science has done is given man a dozen new sets of eyes --- and that makes it a great deal worse. For instance, there's the germ (if it is a germ) that is always swimming just outside the edge of the brightly lighted field of the microscope, that eludes even the electronic microscope. There's the planet (if it is a planet and not some vast black sentient thing poised above the earth) that is seen out of the corner of the telescope's eye. There's the radar echo that doesn't  seem to be coming quite from the moon, but somewhere else. There are the atomic glows that aren't just what the nuclear physicist expected. There's the buried thought that the psychologist can never quite reach, not even when he employs the hypno-analytic technique which can dredge up memories of events that occurred when the patient was six months old. (And is the buried thought a human thought, or a demon's?)....

- Fritz Leiber, from Weird Tales, 1946.

Thanks Fritz. Likewise, there's this underwater frequency that scientists can't quite place.