Quote of the Week

I've missed a few weeks of these, because I ran out of my stored-up quotes and haven't been struck by anything in the books I've been reading. And you know what that means? I've been reading the wrong damn books.

"He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain -- he'd not yet added the final e to his name -- set out for London and was recruited at dockside for service on a privateer ship called the Terrible, commanded by one Captain Death. Thomas's father showed up on the docks in time to save him from what was either a very good allegory or a very bad Ingmar Bergman film. The Terrible sailed without Pain, and Captain Death and the crew were slaughtered."
- Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom: The Stranger Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, pp.19-20