one puzzle she couldn’t solve was people. To Ada, they all seemed to be broken in ways she couldn’t make sense of, and couldn’t fix.

Jordan Stratford, The Case of the Missing Moonstone

Consider also:

  1. “Last summer, during odd days, I worked at this sixfold problem–at the attempt to eliminate these six great drawbacks. I was alone, in camp, and had to puzzle it all out with three dummies before me,–but I worked hard at it, and suddenly the great idea dawned upon me: Choose your own partner!”
  2. “It was as if one of these people–he always thought of them as ‘these people,’ much as he had grown to like and to admire them–should find himself dealing with a group of very alert and resourceful chimpanzees.”
  3. “Sometimes I think you’re too nice,” she said. The fact that she couldn’t sit down without wincing didn’t mean anything.
  4. It had broken their hearts, just as every unfulfilled dream breaks the human heart, but that was life.
  5. “In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons.”