“As to the quality of the beer we cannot testify – perhaps a taste of it today would leave us sadder Budweiser – but when it came to perfumery, the monks were not inexpert.”

“Their quarreling chewed through  the curtains, pierced the casements, and rattled over the cobblestones outside. How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse.”

– Tom Robbins,
Jitterbug Perfume, p.169 and p.174