Gallery

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Tails of lead, tails of marble, minerals and carbon, subterranean world where no one travels: are you not the spirit fallen at the feet of death?

– Raymond Queneau, 1925

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I have never seen the Philosopher's Stone that turns lead into Gold, but I have known the pursuit of it turn a Man's Gold into Lead.

– Benjamin Franklin

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For many centuries chemists labored to change lead into precious gold, and eventually found that precious uranium turned to lead without any human effort at all.

– Isaac Asimov

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The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away.

Jeremiah 6:29-30

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‘I can’t say how, but there was the lead; I felt it under my feet, dark, poisonous, and heavy, for two miles along a stream in a wood where, among the lightning-struck trunks, wild bees nest,’

– Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

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