Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

Norton: Ralph?
Ralph: What?
Norton: Mind if I smoke?
Ralph: I don't care if you burn.

- The Honeymooners, Ed and Ralph get accidentally handcuffed together

[covingtoncat73]

“There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see.”


― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

[covingtoncat73]

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[kennyc]

"My grandmother once told my mother that there is a splice of quartz inside each of us, like the quartz inside a compass or clock. We feel the stone glow warm when we find what it is we are meant to do. My grandmother was a singer; voice was her quartz, a second heartbeat that reminded her always of who she was. My mother’s quartz is dance and Joaquin’s is the piano. The saddest souls in the world, my mother believes, are those who never discover this thing within them. There is a difference between those who wander in search of that glow and those who wander in hopes of evading it. It is frightening, after all—that first awakening when the radiance within threatens to topple you. Even more terrifying is the decision to allow the fire to continue smoldering, because the brighter you let it get, the more terrible the darkness should you ever let it out."

- Elizabeth Genovise "Irises" (O. Henry prize winner 2016)

[covingtoncat73]

“We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell: A Novel

[covingtoncat73]

Mislaid is hilarious. It is quite the send-up of the mores of the Southern Bourgeois intelligentsia with a very fun heroine.

“She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell: A Novel

Quite uplifting.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Quite uplifting.

True, though.

“Envy is lean; it bites but cannot swallow.” Saul Bellow

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Mislaid is hilarious. It is quite the send-up of the mores of the Southern Bourgeois intelligentsia with a very fun heroine.

“She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

If you nominate it this month in the MR Book Club, I'll vote for it.

[BenG]

“We are confused, O Kurt Jastrow. Your civilization stands as a bulwark against irrationality, yet we find no scientific substance in the seminars of Liberace or the symposia of Red Skelton.”

― James K. Morrow, The Madonna and the Starship

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

If you nominate it this month in the MR Book Club, I'll vote for it.

I just did, WT.

[4691mls]

From Helen Hath No Fury, one of the Amanda Pepper cozy mysteries by Gillian Roberts -

The main character is walking down the street and comes to some posters, "which I examined because I feel compelled to read any print in my vicinity."

I'm guessing I'm not the only one on Mobileread who shares that compulsion!

[BenG]

“Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?”
― Connie Willis, Bellwether

[covingtoncat73]

"That’s a guess. Only a guess, but a raven’s guess is worth more than a magpie’s. Aurrk!”
T. Kingfisher, The Raven and the Reindeer