No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.
Diana GabaldonPerhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger than yourself gives you some feeling that there is something larger - and there really has to be, because plainly you aren't sufficient to the situation.
Diana GabaldonI wasn't used to living crowded cheek by jowl with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn't do together was bathe - largely because they didn't bathe.
Diana Gabaldon