I like to think about things that have always been the same, from remote human history up to and including now. People's heads have always been about as hard as they are today and have hurt about the same amount when they bumped together. Horses have always shaken flies off themselves, whether waiting to pull Pharoah's chariots or standing at a kiddie ride at a county fair. Meat cooking on a fire has smelled delicious in exactly the same way forever.
- Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.24
As the bus sailed away with Harry safely on the top deck, she held Candy up so she could wave goodbye to him. He wasn't stupid, he was never going to stop asking questions. Perhaps she should tell him the truth about everything. Truth was such a novel ideal to Crystal that she found herself still staring after the bus had disappeared up the road.
- Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p.315
I have never wanted to write about my drawings, and I still don't want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.
- James Thurber, "The Lady on the Bookcase," p.657-58 in Writings & Drawings
He eyed her apprehensively, like some rat of the underworld cornered by G-men. Painful experience had taught him that visits from Connie meant trouble, and he braced himself, as always, to meet with stout denial whatever charge she might be about to hurl at him. He was a great believer in stout denial and was very good at it.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, pp.10-11
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.693 in Later Novels & Other Writings
It is a long abandoned belief that tourism, like competitive athletics, makes for international friendship. The three most hated peoples in the world - Germans, Americans and British - are the keenest sight-seers. There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who had not seen an Englishman; the result is that the English generally are well disposed toward Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us. Sympathy for foreigners varies directly with their remoteness.
- Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.722 in Waugh Abroad
It is one of the great advantages of being a tycoon that your life trains you to take decisions at the drop of the hat. Where lesser men scratch their heads and twiddle their fingers, the tycoon acts.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.15
I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The only safe thing to say is that I didn't go to my solitary, expensively riverside home. I wasn't sleeping anymore. If you didn't sleep in it, what else is a home for?
- D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.47
Of course, there was a kind of fandom, and I knew them, but they were all real weird freaks, and they were unpalatable to me because they did not read the great literature. There wasn't anybody that read both. You could either be in with a group of freaks who read Heinlein and Padgett and van Vogt and nothing else, or you could be in with the people who read Dos Passos, Melville, and Proust. But you could never get the two together. And I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people. The early fans, they were trolls and wackos. Being stuck with then would have been like the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, I mean, up to your ass in shit. They really were terribly ignorant, weird people.
- Philip K. Dick, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.140
People who do not understand pigeons - and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them - should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. The couldn't even startle a child. This is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and cat-calls and whistling and fainting spells and throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.
- James Thurber, "There's an Owl in My Room," pp.216-217 in Writings and Drawings
"It's a funny thing - I suppose you've noticed it - the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all."
- Gilbert Wynant in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.861 in Complete Novels
On the cue 'five aunts" I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them, I pulled myself together.
- P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, p.10
I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed 'em and throw 'em out. Lots of business. We can't bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You're using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They're just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.
- Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.268 in Later Novels & Other Writings
The real work of the propaganda department was done through unofficial channels. To the horde of competing journalists the government communiqués were of negligible importance. They were transmitted instantly in full by Reuter's [sic] and the other agencies and gave no material for the special news which the editors were demanding. This had to be procured by other means; it had to be jealously guarded from rivals. It could not be investigated for fear of attracting their attention. An exclusive lie was more valuable than a truth which was shared with others.
- Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.652 in Waugh Abroad
An army in line-of-battle awaiting attack, or prepared to deliver it, presents strange contrasts. At the front are precision, formality, fixity, and silence. Toward the rear these characteristics are less and less conspicuous, and finally, in point of space, are lost altogether in confusion, motion and noise. The homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. Definition is lacking; repose is replaced by an apparently purposeless activity; harmony vanishes in hubbub, form in disorder. Commotion everywhere and ceaseless unrest. The men who do not fight are never ready.
- Ambrose Bierce, "One Officer, One Man," p.101 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs
