Bolesław Prus

“ He smiled sadly.
"Where is consciousness, love, hate, yearning?..."
"Ha! ha! ha!..." he laughed softly.
"In short — where are the human souls and hearts?..."
"Ha! ha! ha!..."
I was offended by his demeanor.
"Who are you?..." I asked.
Just then I found myself back in the garden, beside the boulder, whose shapeless splotches swam in the moonlight. ”

“ More remarkably, they form as it were societies which you see here in the form of the variously colored splotches — they cultivate the ground beneath them for the next generations — they proliferate, colonize empty places, even fight one another. ”

“ They comprised myriads of infinitesimal points, ostensibly motionless but actually moving very lazily: an individual point moved at most by a two-minute arc in an hour, and that not in a straight line but as it were oscillating about its own center of motion. ”