"I can remember that I was asked, perhaps when I was a junior, if I would give some lectures in the evening for students who were having trouble in freshman chemistry . . . I can remember presenting chemical bond theory on the 'hook-and-eye' basis . . . [When] I ran across the papers by Langmuir which were published that year . . . I was very impressed by this work on the electronic structure of molecules or ideas about shared electron pair bonds, and it may well be that that was the start of my interest in chemical bonding."

Linus Pauling. Interview by John Heilbron, in Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, by Anthony Serafini. 1964.

"I had become interested in the question of the nature of the chemical bond, after having read the 1916 paper on the shared-electron-pair chemical bond by G.N. Lewis and the several 1919 and 1920 papers by Irving Langmuir on this subject."

Linus Pauling. The Chemical Bond: Structure of Dynamics, Ahmed Zewail, ed. 1992.