We starve the rats, creosote the ticks, swat the flies, step on the cockroaches and poison the scales. Yet when these pests appear in human form we go paralytic. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture. – Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography,

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. – D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence