• Patient Grizelda by Giovanni Boccaccio
• The Saga of Gunnlaung Serpent-tongue by Anonymous
• On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts by Thomas De Quincet
• Aphorisms on Love and Hate by Friedrich Nietzsche

We must think of men who are cruel today as stages of earlier cultures, which have been left over (…). They are backward men, whose brains, because of various possible accidents of heredity, have not yet developed much delicacy or versatility. They show us what we all were, and frighten us. But they themselves are as little responsible as a piece of granite for being granite. (p. 7)

• Traffic by John Ruskin

What we like determines what we are, and is a sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. (p. 5)

• The Roots of Honour by John Ruskin

The tendency of all modern mercantile operations is to throw both wages and trade into the form of lottery, and to make the workman’s pay depend on intermittent exertion, and the principal’s profit on dexterously used chance. (p. 46)

• The Troll by Pu Songling
• The Monster in the Buckwheat by Pu Songling
• Stealing a Peach by Pu Songling
• The masculinity paradox: facial masculinity and beardedness interact to determine women’s ratings of men’s facial attractiveness by Dixson B. J. W. et al
• Growing Pears by Pu Songling
• The Golden Goblet by Pu Songling
• Wailing Ghosts by Pu Songling
• Scorched Moth the Taoist by Pu Songling
• The Giant Turtle by Pu Songling
• A fatal Joke by Pu Songling
• A Prank by Pu Songling
• King of the Nine Mountains by Pu Songling
• Butterfly by Pu Songling
• The Black Beast by Pu Songling
• The Stone Bowl by Pu Songling