Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountainside: its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge and peer out through a quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises them seven states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from there, like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes the visitors, millions upon millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at back-lit dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.

– American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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As near as anyone could figure it out, the exact center of the continental United States was several miles from Lebanon, Kansas, on Johnny Grib’s hog farm. By the 1930s the people of Lebanon were all ready to put a monument up in the middle of the hog farm, but Johnny Grib said that he didn’t want millions of tourists coming in and tramping all over and upsetting the hogs, so they put the monument to the geographical center of the United States two miles north of the town. They built a park, and a stone monument to go in the park, and a brass plaque on the monument. They blacktopped the road from the town, and, certain of the influx of tourists waiting to arrive, they even built a motel by the monument. Then they waited.

The tourists did not come. Nobody came.

– American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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"So when we get to Madison, what then?"

"Take Highway 14 west to Spring Green. We'll be meeting everyone at a place called the House on the Rock. You been there?"

"No," said Shadow. "But I've seen the signs."

– American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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Mark Twain is buried, along with his family, at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, NY.

Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 at the age of 74.

The family plot has a plaque that is hung 2 fathoms (12 feet) high, the same distance that gave the writer his pen name.

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Oh, how nice it was here. The typical, pure beer hall style led my mind elsewhere, to more classical periods, not that the place came across as museum-like for that reason, there was nothing forced about the atmosphere, people came here to drink beer and chat, the way they had done ever since the 1930s. This was one of Stockholm's great virtues, that there were so many places from different epochs that were still in operation without their making a great song and dance about it.

- My Struggle Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgaard

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