We split up. I walked down to the beach and found a seafood restaurant. I do not think I was followed there (unless, of course, I was being followed by the people who didn't want me to know they were following me - perhaps an elaborate tag operation was in place involving Portuguese pensioners, a man painting some railings, and small boys in bathing suits, but on the other hand I do not think so.)
- Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures with Extremists, p. 130
At any rate, among the fantasies I nurtured into manhood - a princely income and a sleek, piratical schooner for cruising the Great Barrier Reef to mention only two - was a clear-cut image of my ideal study. Its appointments varied from time to time; on occasion the walls were book-lined, or hung with rare trophies like Mrs. Gray's lechwe or a sitatunga, or again bare except for a few gems of Impressionist painting. The focus, the keystone of the décor, nonetheless, never varied - a capacious, swollen club chair, well polished, into whose depth one sank and somniferously browsed through the latest English review. There might be a revolving mahogany bookcase alongside, but I wasn't sure.
- S.J. Perelman, "Monomania, You and Me Is Quits," p.204 in The World of S.J. Perelman
It is not often given to a footman to electrify his employer's family as if he had touched off a bomb under their noses. The duties of the junior servants in English country houses selfdom afford scope for such a feat. In the whole of England that day, Charles was probably the only youth of his rank who with a single speech had caused a baronet to bite his tongue, a baronet's lady to come within an ace of heart-failure, and the second son of an earl to drop his monocle - all simultaneously,. And the ironic part of it was that the record-breaker had no notion of the sensational deed he had performed; for, after the first involuntary reaction, the members of the Council had recovered their British poise and were themselves again.
- P.G. Wodehouse, If I Were You, p.67
America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it has always been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped towards the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point., The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country, which all kinds of different people share.
- Ian Frazier, On the Rez, p.213
And so I departed this life, far from home. But whether I was home or not, I had had a good life. A somewhat shorter one than I had anticipated, but I had had the money, I had had the girls, and nobody told me what to do. Is there, really, anything else? Are you sure?
- Algis Budrys, Hard Landing, p.369 (in SF Gateway Omnibus)
I've heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.
- Haruki Murakami, "With the Beatles," p.88-89 in First Person Singular
For the next hour, we could do no wrong. Nearly every one of our thirty short plays inspired the crowd to ecstasy. And funny! I'd never gotten so many laughs, especially when addressing capital punishment, gun control, and reproductive rights. As far as teaching tolerance, our pupils seemed amiably disposed to parrot any theory we felt like pushing, the way football fans will oblige the announcer by doing the wave on demand. Having endured the brutality of a recently deposed regime, they saw us as ambassadors from the Great Rock Candy Mountain, You don't argue with the guys who know the way to the lemonade springs and the cigarette trees.
- Ayun Halliday, No Touch Monkey!, p.241-242
In his bearing, as he hurried along the path that skirted the kitchen garden - in the oily smirk beneath his repellent moustache, in the jaunty tilt of his snub nose, even in the terraced sweep of the brilliantine swamps of his corrugated hair - there was the look of a man who is congratulating himself on a neat bit of work. Brains, reflected Percy Pilbeam - that was what you needed in this life. Brains and the ability to seize your opportunity when it was offered to you.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Heavy Weather, p.230
You've seen someone getting drunk with a purpose before. Maybe it was your father or your sister. Maybe you've looked in the mirror once or twice late at night or on one of those awful mornings when you started in early. There's a cone of darkness that comes spiraling out from the middle of your forehead. It's like black water, or like cold, cold space, like a black hole. It'll pull you in. It wants to pull you into yourself through that hole in the middle of your forehead.
- Josh Ritter, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, p. 79
The rest of the interview was uneventful. Buzz and I parted on cordial terms, and I went back to work and did my best to put it out of my mind. Usually I'm pretty good at that - moving forward, focusing on the task at hand - because you have to be, if you're going to accomplish anything in this world. The past is always looking over your shoulder, whispering things you don't want to hear. You just have to ignore it until it goes away.
- Tom Perrotta, Tracy Flick Can't Win, p.151
Immediately following his promotion, Bierce served temporarily as provost marshal, helping to police the camp and enforce discipline,. One of his duties was to assist at military executions, a typically unwanted duty that Bierce, with his taste for the grotesque, found rather diverting. At one such event, two Union soldiers were to be hanged for "a particularly atrocious murder outside of the issues of war"; they had apparently killed Southern civilians instead of Southern soldiers, a finely drawn distinction often lost on enlisted men, then and now.
- Roy Morris, Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, p.53
She now understood that Brian emphasized his feelings for his wife over and over again for the same reason that people with a fear of heights told themselves not to look down when they were at the top of a tall building: he was afraid. Every time she went into his office, another beautiful young woman was coming out. It was sweet, really. He actually was deeply in love with his wife and he wanted to keep it that way.
- Nick Hornby, Funny Girl, p.81
J. Bromley Lippincott was a tall, dark cadaverous man who looked about sixty, as he had probably looked at the age of ten, and gave the impression, not unusual with attorneys-at-law, of having seen so much of life's murky side that he now automatically suspected everyone he met of nameless crimes. Formidable was the word for J. Bromley and sinister the word for the bulging briefcase which he bore with him like a warrior's shield. Too small to contain a corpse, except possibly that of a Singer midget, it was large enough to hold the guilty secrets of half the population of New York, and the nervous beholder, eyeing it, had visions of documents suddenly popping out of its interior which would prove him, the nervous beholder, to be legally debarred from being a feoffee of any fee, fiduciary or in fee simple or something of that nature. It was that sort of briefcase.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Barmy in Wonderland, pp.191
These are the details - the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances - on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.
- Joan Didion, Salvador, p.348 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
Life on the Road: Diary of 1977: February
Friday 11th! Cleveland. Maybe the best show so far. You know what? it's great to play depressed towns because they know how to rock. It's all they have sometimes. Strange how the band seems to play well when it doesn't matter.
- Ray Davies, Americana, p.116
