Quotes from Books I Read in 2010

Eh.

Quill found her patience wearing thin. "Harvey, if the town really insists on doing this, don't you think we should open it to little boys, too?" Neither man looked at her, which told Quill they'd discussed the possibility that she would bring it up.

"Women's lib," said Elmer. "Well, I guess we got to consider you feminists. Now, I'm all for women's lib, Quill, or should I say -- (this with heavy jocularity) -- "Ms. Quilliam, but I don't know as how we could get the town to support a beauty contest for boys. Now, if we had a category like Best Little Fisherman, or Best Little, I dunno, some more boy-like thing..."

"Best Little Bow Hunter?" Quill heard herself say. "Best Little Sport with a Shotgun? Best little penis?"

"Oh, my God," said Elmer.

"It's the gunshot wound," said Harvey. "Saw a lot of it with 'Nam."

"Harvey, you were never in 'Nam," said Elmer, "not even close."

"I didn't say 'in' 'Nam, I said 'with' 'Nam."

"Ayuh. You know what you need, Quill? A nice cup of coffee or something."

Quill went into the kitchen to get a nice cup of coffee or something.

"I'm losing it," she told her sister. "It's the gallery business all over again. One-way trips to remote mountain areas are starting to look attractive."

"Explain," said Meg.

Meg demonstrated the proper degree of outrage over the Little Miss Hemlock Falls Beauty Contest, loyally endorsed Quill's proposed category, and immediately began preparing cappuccino as a restorative.

The statue of the man and his horse had been erected in 1868, two hundred years after the founding of the village. Something had gone awry in the casting process, and the General's face had a wrinkled brow and half-open mouth, leaving him with a permanently pained expression as he sat in the saddle. On occasion, roving hordes of Cornell students on spring break heaped boxes of hemorrhoid remedies at the statue's base, which sent the mayor into fits. Most years the statue sat detritus-free, except for the six-foot heap of cobble stones piled at the foot and used to crush the witch each year.

She left an apologetic message on Dr. Madison's phone machine, changed into her bear cub pajamas, accepted a glass of her own wine and folded down on the sofa with a heaping plate of spaghetti left over from Patsy's dinner. A far superior evening to dining at Windows on the World with the double burden of being pleasant and attractive simultaneously.

"Look at this! Look what you've done to my house! You've ruined it!"

"Your mama," said Elinor, "is peering at us through the camellia bushes."

Colonel Bantry was shooed back into the dining-room like a recalcitrant hen.

"You must have had a very interesting life, Colonel Race?" said Miss Beddingfeld, gazing at him with wide, starry eyes.

That's how they do it, these girls! Othello charmed Desdemona by telling her stories, but, oh, didn't Desdemona charm Othello by the way she listened?

I wanted to write about people who were not just out, but out there, people who lived their sexual lives in ways most of us could only imagine…and for whom the flavor vanilla had absolutely no appeal. I interviewed porn stars, prostitutes, self-proclaimed sex pigs, and delved into bizarre sexual practices. It was eye-opening, arousing, and a lot of fun (but never, never good clean fun).

Black water lapped lazily against the brick walls of the town hall and the Osceola Hotel. The water was otherwise silent and unmoving. People who have never lived through a flood may imagine that fish swim in and out of the broken windows of submerged houses, but they don't. In the first place, the windows don't break, for no matter how well constructed a house may have been, the water rises through the floorboards, and the windowless pantry is flooded to the same depth as the front porch. And beyond that, the fish keep to the old riverbedsd, just as if they hadn't twenty or thirty feet more of new freedom above that. Floodwater is foul, and filled with foul things, and catfish and bream, though they don't like the unaccustomed darkness, swim in confused circles around their old rocks and their old weeds and their familiar bridge pilings.

She greeted me with one of those piercing view-halloos which she had picked up on the hunting field in the days when she had been an energetic chivvier of the British fox. It sounded like a gas explosion and went through me from stem to stern. I've never hunted, myself, but I understand that half the battle is being able to make noises like some jungle animal with dyspepsia, and I believe that Aunt Dahlia in her prime could lift fellow members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two plowed fields and a stretch of woodland.

I put the milk back in the refrigerator, carefully ignoring a saucer containing three dead frogs, a gift from Melissa to Brian. When I was Melissa's age, girls baked peanut butter cookies for their boyfriends. Dead frogs may signal a new and welcome phase in female-male relationships. "What kind of gun was it?"

"I'm Margarita Staples." She bowed in her harness. "Extreme librarian. Bookaneer."

Traumatized and transformed, Crockett appears on the scene in season five bearing significant psychological wounds because he has been deprive of the memories out of which his identity as Crockett is formed.

Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.

My parents' Ford wagon hit a concrete divider on U.S. 95 outside Biddeford, Maine, in August 1990. They'd driven that stretch of highway for maybe thirty years, on the way to Long Lake. Some guy who used to play baseball with Pop had these cabins by the lake and had named them for his children. Jenny. Al. Tyler. Craig. Bugs. Alice and Sam. We always got Alice for two weeks in August, because it had the best waterfront, with a shallow, sandy beach, and Mom and Pop could watch us while they sat in the green Adirondack chairs.

Inside Cassandra's trailer they find the subject of their speculation.

The host [of Greet the Press] was a genial, ruddy-faced man named Glen Waddowes. He began his career as a Benedictine monk, left the order under circumstances never entirely clarified, then became a speechwriter and ultimately chief of staff to the governor of New York ... Beneath Waddowes's jolly, rubicund exterior lurked a mind armed with brass knuckles, a shank and a blackjack. He had famously derailed the presidential campaign of Senator Root Hollings by asking him, "Senator, with all due respect, what makes you think a man like you has the right to run for president?"

She was a servant of the old school, eager to please. But she had one well-known flaw. Gwen beheld Mrs. Bewley sticking the sugar tongs coyly into her bosom, the dear old kleptomaniac. It was just a habit she had. She didn't mean anything by it. Mrs. Goss always frisked her sternly before she went home. Mrs. Bewley never seemed to mind at all. "WHY, HOW DID THAT GET THERE. OH, TAKE IT, TAKE IT," she would say nobly, when the frying pan turned up in her shirtfront.

"You Americans are born restless," said Clive. "I don't know how you stand going to bed at night and just lying there until morning."

She got rid of him the fast way, handing his exit over to a big slab of a man, all fat, no muscle, ugly as hell too. At the outside lock of the Cap's ship Frank turned back to him. 'How often does your Cap deal straight?'

The man's smile made him uglier still. 'She's old. Nobody's killed her yet. You work it out.' The hatch hissed closed.

Hibbet pinched his chin. "The swirling molten layer under the crust is what creates the magnetic field that surrounds the earth. Any disruption of the field has the potential to cause all sorts of disturbances."

Professor Adler pounded his fist on the table. "I knew I was right! Someone has been monkeying around with my ocean."

"Mom, is this another ploy of yours to push Tate and me together?"

"Now why would you ask a thing like that?"

"Because two weeks ago, you locked us in the walk-in cooler in the bakery, and we almost froze to death because you thought a near-death experience might bring us to our senses about our feelings for each other. Or does that little episode not ring a bell?"

"I should have left you in for five more minutes."

"Mom!"

"She's more likely to shoot it," Mike said. "Or run it over with her animal control Jeep.That Carol Ann's damn mean."
"Shoot Bismarck!" Clarissa said. "She can't do that."
"Not at night, that's for sure," Mike said. "Sheriff's department took away her infrared rifle."

When I kidded about the pad, I referred to it as a ‘place to lay my hat and a few friends’.

"We should wade through them and slice them, let their blood stain our feet as we tread upon their corpses," Jeggred suggested, his own long strides easily matching Quenthel's quicker ones.
The Mistress of Tier Breche looked over at the draegloth and saw him lick his feral lips in anticipation. "Nonsense," she said.

I think: Here I am, in the middle of a blizzard in the heart of Antarctica, in a plane that can't take off, and the conditions are worsening. It is a very white, very close to the bone, truth.

Shrike reached out and took one of his hands and led him through the crowded market, swinging her white cane gently in front of her feet. The effect of that cane was less that of a blind person feeling her way along than her warning people that she was coming, Spyder thought. Everyone and everything got out of her way.

Sometimes I'd be so drunk at the end of the night I'd have to drive home with one eye shut, to avoid double vision.

The gentleman on table twenty-three plans to propose and has arranged for us to deliver a Faberge egg at the end of their meal. Proposals are nerve-racking for everyone involved. While terrified lovers contemplate eternity in sickness, poverty, death, or worse, equally anxious servers imagine ruining what might be the high point of these people's lives together, before the bankruptcy, the Botox, and his affair with the life coach.

Here was this elegant old woman chatting amiably to a brother she'd poisoned almost forty years before.

There were two squash courts on Deep Storm, and a three-day waiting list to get court time. It was an example of Asher's clout, Crane though, that the man had been able to get them a half-hour slot with a few minutes notice.
"I never figured you for a reader of poetry," Asher said when they met on the court. "But your being a squash player is a no-brainer."
"Maybe it's my gazelle-like physique," Crane replied.

The car spun violently around, twice, perhaps three times--D'Agosta was too shaken to be sure--before coming to rest on the very edge of the cliff.
They paused just a moment, the acrid smell of burned brake pads wafting over the car.
"Fiat, for all its troubles, still knows how to make a decent vehicle," said Pendergast.
"Eurocar isn't going to like this," D'Agosta replied.

Rigid enjoyment of planning can get you high. Militant time management will enable you to ignore how maladjusted you would be if you had the time to notice it in the first place. Discipline is not anal compulsion; it's a lifestyle that breeds power. The only insult I've ever received in my adult life was when someone asked me, "Do you have a hobby?" A HOBBY?! DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?!

The ocean around him was noisy. It was something you noticed on a night dive--the sea was alive with night creatures, eating and clicking with a strange, almost mechanical sound, like a giant bank of electronic relays far off.

Continuing the theme of Twats Reunited, another Miller Shanks refugee joined in December. Tell Vince to brace himself: Susi is Ted's new PA. She hasn't changed much except that now she's triple-barreled--Susi Judge-Davis-Gaultier. She married a Frenchy, a very distant relative of the fashion queen himself. She predictably vocal about the connection, though I don't suppose Jean Paul has registered that he now has a total fuckwit dangling from the family tree like a label-dressed gibbon. Her skirts are shorter than ever. Her gyno needn't bother getting her in for an exam any more. He just has to sit opposite her on the tube.

"Did I catch you at a bad time?" Nate asked.
"No, I was just getting ready to hop into the shower. I managed to convince Halden Kuckleman to take a look at the building." Casey sat on the couch, aware passing motorists might be able to see in the window. He knew it wouldn't look good if they spotted their new revered walking around in the nude.
"Well congratulations," Nate chuckled. "On getting Hal over, not being naked."

I'm a white girl from New England, with a snooty college education that prepared me to teach English classes to other uptight Boston kids. To be discussing rumors of pubic lice in a dingy Sunset Boulevard motel, is not where I expected my life to take me.

--Karen Marie Christa Minns, "Streetwork L.A./Hollywood"

Carina was sitting up on the edge of the bed, trying to put a shoe on her foot. She was having a hard time with her hand-eye coordination. She seemed angrier at her foot than at anyone in particular.
Austin stood in the doorway. "Need a hand?"

"Shut up!" Brian said, and sat next to Roger on the bed. "I'm serious, I think I'm in love with him. He's an incredible guy, and the fact that he's built like a Mayan god and has a cock that would make a porn star blush is just an added bonus."

"I assume you haven't told Carl and Jo."

"Of course not, and I'm not sure I'm going to."

"Well, they aren't exactly slow. I think they're going to figure it out when the grandbabies speak Spanish."

"Not hilarious," Brian said.

"Hello, Doctor Holland," he boomed, smiling beatifically. "I am...God" He was perched on his bed like a guru on a mountaintop, in the midst of a manic episode, flying high on his own neurochemicals. He felt so good, he squirmed with pleasure, yet his manner was composed, a king on a throne. I called my mother that evening as soon as I walked into my new apartment. My white coat--stuffed with reflex hammer, penlight, and pocket guides--clunked to the floor. "You're not going to believe this. It's the best-case scenario. I am starting my medical career at the very top." I paused for dramatic effect. "I am God's doctor!"
"There's nowhere to go but down," my mother deadpanned.

I've lived in my house for ten years, and the books are crushing me. I've given away carloads, and still they reproduce. Somewhere in these disorderly shelves is a novel pulished in 1981 called Easy Travel to Other Planets. The novel, by Ted Mooney, was notorious when it came out because one character, a female marine biologist, has sex with a dolphin. For me, though, the most memorable passage is the description of the affliction from which the denizens of this slightly futuristic world suffer: information sickness. There is too much to take in.

Mechanical carp swam in slow circles in the ornamental pool. Ismail paused to watch one of the fish, an orange and white creation with showy fins, bump its head repeatedly against the wall. He knew how that felt, so he crouched and set the carp on its proper path.

--Kate Cotoner, "Conduit"

'You should know,' said Serge. 'Any behaviorist will tell you it's a healthy condition of the animal kingdom, how all living things are programmed for survival. But your medication deadens those urges. And if an animal stops having them, it means his wiring's crossed, and he ends up doing something unnatural like beaching himself and flopping in the sand, making shrill clicking noises , and then the lifeguards ask you to move along because "you're frightening the children"...'

"Grow," I whispered.

But the fact remained that Sapphire Vine was dead. Someone had killed her. And though Candy found it not only absurd but also literally painful to think that Herr Georg could have plunged a hammer into the back of Sapphire's head (not to mention how painful it must have been for Sapphire herself) the fact remained that he had an excellent motive for doing just that.

Yanonali Street bent north at the city limits to join a state highway. A pair of two-story stucco buildings stood in the angle of the roads. One was the El Recreo Pool and Shuffleboard Arcade. Men and boys brandishing cues moved in its smoky green light like heavy-footed spearfishers walking on the floor of the sea. On the roof of the other building, a high-heeled slipper outlined in yellow bulbs hinted broadly at women and champagne gaiety. Some of the bulbs were missing.

Redwoods are known for their thick ax-eating bark. Pacific Lumber solved that problem by fighting with water. A high-pressure nozzle propelled jets of water at the bark, striking it with a force of sixteen hundred pounds per square inch. In the course of a minute, twelve hundred gallons of water pounded the bark, flaying it clean. I watched the skinning of a tree behind a safety window. Every bad horror film shows blood spattering up against glass. The pulverized bark splashed my window in just such a way.

At breakfast one morning a loud explosion sounded just outside the hospital. Denise was so startled that she jumped, almost tipping over her coffee cup. The others merely smiled at the following burst of gunfire.
"It's the beginning of our social season," explained Anne Pigeon.

Feeling death's hand, Judith screamed.

Pathologizing what's societally unacceptable isn't new; in the last 1800s, women were classified as sexual inverts if they had "a dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework" as well as an "inclination and taste for the sciences". Men could be inverts if they "never smoked" were "entirely averse to outdoor games" and "liked cats".

I remembered Glenn telling me about finding two boys who had fallen to their deaths on an icy day a little ways above here, just at the base of the Cleaver. He didn't have any nets or body bags with him, so he had to fly them out with the cable just hooked to their climbing harnesses. He figured that if he flew the dead boys out one at a time, each hanging from his waist and splayed out with his head and arms and legs dangling down, it would look really bad, especially since, because of where the accident had happened, the helicopter would fly right over Camp Muir and all the climbers there. He decided to hook both of the bodies in at the same time and then he duct-taped them together so they'd stay upright, so it looked like they were holding onto each other.

Most of the houses in town were single story, designed with a front porch where people could sit on their swings in warm weather, fan themselves and say unkind things about their neighbors in relative comfort.

"Figures lie and liars figure, and the only thing worth all the trouble is a good bourbon, a good bed and a busy woman."

By six he had not called back, so for dinner she slipped on a red sweater of Daisy's, hoping it would distract the mood-sniffing elders from her disappointment.

It was a nice night. Cold, the way he remembered it could get in the mountains in September, but with a half moon and enough starlight so they could see their way. He noticed a clean, fresh fragrance he thought at first was windborne, until he realized it was coming from the woman at his side. He wondered what it was. Not perfume--it was too natural, too much a part of her. Shampoo, maybe; the top of her head was almost level with his nose, and the breeze was stirring those pale wisps of hair around her face.

The idea that Red thought meeting my drunk aunt and uncle meant that we were on the brink of getting engaged was ridiculous. I understand that meeting someone's family usually means you're taking the relationship to the next level, but not with my family. Obviously, if I was serious about having a relationship with someone long-term, the last people I would introduce him to would be my family.

Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.

"There are a lot of bad things about athletics everywhere," Patrick says. "Starting with Little League or Pop Warner, there's this concept that to be a man is to be an athlete, to be an athlete is to be strong, and to be strong you have to have a certain attitude." ...Still, he played the jock role; he walked the walk and talked the talk of a stud.

I found myself unable to locate a quote I really liked in it, much like the author apparently found him/herself unable to locate a last name.

The fire in the ky had died, leaving long wisps of cloud like steraks of ashes livid against the night. All I could see of the mountains was their giant hadowed forms shouldering the faintly lighted sky. A few lights sprinkled their flanks, and a car's headlights inched down into the other side of the valley and were lost in darkness. Then the night was so still that motion seemed impossible, all of us insects caught in the final amber. I moved and broke the spell, feeling my way down the dew-slick terraces beside the flagstone walk.

The draft did nothing to quell her blazing, exposed areas that were already too hot to handle--even with oven mitts. Tristan's gaze perused her body in a smoldering caress. Cyndy prepared to linger, but Tristan pulled a fast one and grasped her wrist. She was escorted to the rear of the home that led to the bath. A quick, cool rinse did nothing to diminish her fevered flesh.

"Charming," said Lea, narrowing her eyes. "I like a man who isn't afraid to make an ass of himself."

It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romantic movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night.
At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughy type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.

I looked up slowly from my work so that the round lenses of my spectacles would flash blank white semaphores of light at her. I knew that whenever I did this, Ophelia had the horrid impression that she was in the presence of some mad black-and-white German scientist in a film at the Gaumont.

The brandy had been absolutely essential. It always was on Sunday nights, when Sister Ignatius took it upon herself to cook and serve Father Newberry a "proper meal". In this part of Wisconsin, that usually translated to hamburger cooked in canned cream soup.
The shape varied with the good sister's whims--sometimes meatballs, sometimes meatloaf, and on one memorable occasion, rolled tubes that looked disturbingly like a casserole of severed penises--but the basic ingredients and the resulting indigestion were always the same.
Father Newberry had learned long ago that antacids couldn't touch it. Only the brandy helped, blessing him with a quick sleep where he passed the time in happy oblivion while his stomach fought the demons of Sister Ignatius's kindness.

"I'm going for the death penalty," Assistant District Attorney Clayton Snedley said cheerfully.He was an ex-priest and he loved his job, it being easier to punish the guilty than it had been to forgive them.

Mr. Court, I never would have  guessed.  Not  with  the  way  Artemus  Williams  threw his hat  on  the ground  and  stomped—stomped,  I  tell  you—all  over that fine piece of haberdashery when he heard.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others' throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke.

We rolled into Big Rapids. It was quarter of twelve and Big Rapids had folded for the night. Its handful of traffic lights blinked yellow, giving us plain sailing. We rolled straight through and in a few minutes were tunneling up through the pines on the secondary road to Thaxter. The rain was still coming down and up here it was blowing some, driving the rain against the windshield in hard drumming pellets. I could hear a little thunder far off among the peaks.

Impaled on a spear of endless, relentless ecstasy he felt himself careen through space. Every nerve and clamored [sic] with frantic delight, every fibre responded to this new, hard-driving need. He shot wildly toward the stars, brushed against their white-hot luminescence, dived crazily downward through the fantastic heat of spatial friction, shuddered, then careened directly into the fiery tale of a soaring comet.

And still Theodosia couldn't make a clean getaway. Linus Gillette, Abby's boss and the general manager at Trident Media, noticed her, blocked her way, then engaged her in conversation. Maybe because she was the only person who looked familiar to him at the moment; maybe because he was a blowhard who loved to hear himself talk.

Theodosia took Haley up on her offer. Marched back to her small office, eased herself into her cushy desk chair, and cleared away some of the clutter that littered her desk. Tea catalogs, magazines, a scatter of recipes, her swag bag from last night. Blocking the door to the alley were boxes of teapots yet to be unpacked. In fact, the only organized space seemed to be the wall opposite her desk. She had recently hung an assortment of elegant straw hats there. Trimmed with silk flowers and gauzy ribbons, they were pleasing and restful to the eye--so, yes, now she could dig into lunch.

She munched a piece of Swiss cheese, spread a little chutney on a slice of French bread. And, because Theodosia was a compulsive multitasker, stuck her hand into her Mylar swag bag and pulled out the Tinseltown Weekly magazine that was rolled up inside.

Anyway, we couldn't find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District.

San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and listen to the Germs' first album. Everyone here is so young--it's like Microsoft that way--a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there's an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places. It's a big town that feels like neighborhoods: a municipal expression of Local Area Networks.

Of course, life rarely remains that humdrum for very long. The bottom was about to drop out from under us and there we were, as usual, without our protective bottom-dropping safety apparatuses on. Luckily, there was a silver lining, but again, only in retrospect do I now see how tarnished that silver was. Why, oh why, is hindsight twenty–twenty? Too bad you can’t have some kind of LASIK surgery on your foresight. Oh, well, I guess, as they say, that’s what makes life interesting. Anyway, here comes that dropping bottom I promised.

"Fascinating," declared Theodosia Browning as her quizzical blue eyes roved about the hexagon-shaped room. Packed with antique medical instruments, colorful jars, and old anatomical charts, the tucked-away alcove must have been the old surgical suite back when this Victorian-style Charleston home had been a hospital almost a century and a half ago, Theodosia decided. Its builder and owner had made a fortune in early pharmaceuticals and patent drugs. Because, lord, have mercy, she told herself, this is what medical facilities were like in the 1860s.

Highway 101 divides into two branches on the Peninsula. The western branch, Camino Real, doubles as the main street of a forty-mile-long city which stretches almost unbroken from San Francisco to San Jose. Its traffic movement is slow, braked by innumerable stop-lights. The name of the endless city changes as you go south and cross the invisible borders of municipalities: Day City, Millbrae, San Mateo, San Carlos, Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos.

"Okay, there's this gorilla, right? But he's not just any gorilla--he's a ninja. A ninjarilla, if you will. And but so then like early in life he's abducted by pirates and he becomes a pirate captain himself.

I mentioned that this all takes place in outer space, right?

And then because he's the only one with all of these special skills, [the ninjarilla]'s the one who gets chosen by the United Nations to fight the dinosaurs. Because in this world, space is like totally full of dinosaurs. Oh, and the dinosaurs are wizards."

They called LaRue on their way to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He closed down the set--where he was filming the scene he was planning to use Joey in--and drove in with another director, John Rutherford, from the studio in the Valey, meeting them in the emergency room. The hospital staff asked for an immediate relative, and Kane supplied Stefano's mother's phone number. But because they weren't relatives, the small group gathered in the hospital waiting room wasn't given any information on Stefano's status, and all sat in numbed, expectant silence. Eventually Kane, anxious and frustrated, told the staff that she was Stefano's fiancee. That seemed to be all the formality needed, and the group was led into another room with a doctor and police officer, where, at about 1 p.m., they were informed Stefano had died. The coroner found a more than deadly combination of drugs in his system: cocaine, morphine, heroin and ketamine (Special K).

Ninety-nine percent of the things that ninety-nine percent of the people do are entirely predictable, when you have a few lead facts. Drunks, maniacs and pregnant women are the customary exceptions.

Magozzi and Gino were at the big front table in Homicide, making copies of the reams of paperwork they'd all accumulated since the night Arlen Fischer and Morey Gilbert had been murdered. Paul Shafer was in the Malcherson's office now with a couple of his FBI henchmen, formalizing the turnover of the Fischer case and all related evidence. They'd be here in a few minutes to collect it.
McLaren wheeled in a dolly with four large boxes hed retrieved from the evidence room. "This is the last of the stuff we took from Fischer's place." He stopped at Gloria's desk and wiped his forehead. "You want to give me a hand with this, Miss Gloria?"
She held up ten black-enameled fingers and wiggled them. "Look at these and tell me how much of a fool you are for asking such a stupid question."
McLaren put a hand to his heart. "I am a fool. I am anything you want me to be. All you have to do is ask."
"I want you to be gone."

“Oh, you probably believe you’ve suddenly become this enlightened pro-indigenous chuma, but I know your kind. I’ll be waiting for you to trip up and show your true colours. Your type always do. Hear this, Ythen. There is more to udawa than symbols and rituals and teachings. There is more to the people of the Spirit than the belief, and the history. You’ll never understand us, unless you live with us, work with us, suffer with us, and you can’t suffer with us because you are Kelon and you look Kelon. This is an amusing pastime for you. My aunt has given her whole life to the service of our people and the Spirit, as have I. There is no point of commonality between us, no comparison."
I sucked in my teeth. “So, no chance of a shag, then?”

There was nothing else I wanted to say, about Claire or Angie or anyone else. I just wanted to get away from it, the curse that Oxtail had cast upon everyone who lived there. That was where the guilt lay, with the town, with the collective consciousnes that twisted and bent and spoiled and soured the people who had grown up with it, breathing its vapors. But they don't put towns in jail. They probably should, but they don't.

Sunday evening turned a rosy pink and then a deeper blush and then a reddish-lavender-blue and then purple and black, the golden day succumbing at last to night.

It was time to go buy a gun.

At first, our Spartan diet slowed us down, our morning sugar crashes translating to falls on hard climbs, or motivation sapped by early afternoon. Then without understanding cause and effect, I came to expect--then enjoy--the shock of a body desperate for food. The natural dizzy high or climbing all day without eating translated to weakness in my legs but also a carefree giddiness. I associated that light-headed feeling with the satisfaction of a hard day of climbing. I came to equate hunger with happiness. --Susan Fox Rogers, "Climber Girl"

Coolly, she leaped to another clump of sedge, then running to the nearest horse she caught up the reins and got into the saddle.
He was floundering in the water and lily pads. "Help me! Help! I can't swim!"
"Everybody has troubles!" she said, and rode away.

{None. It's a graphic novel completely devoid of words.}

I witnessed countless beautiful waves--thin-lipped, almond-shaped barrels, sometimes with a skilled rider tucked tightly inside--and experienced none of the stress of trying to compete for them. I had a chance to soak in the view of pale cliffs rising above the beach, which reminded me of Baja with their cactus and prairielike grasses, and the shore cloaked in dark cobbles that shooshed and growled as the flux of foamy whitewash rolled them to and fro.

Even before the game, we knew we were going to beat 'em," Hugh Harris remembered. Harris would also grease the psychological wheels and call attention to an opponent's tendency to dive and draw penalties. "Just a simple little thing like before the game stared, before (referee) Bill Friday would drop the puck, I would go over and say, 'Bill, tell this guy over here, meaning (Cincinnati Stingers') Dennis Sobchuk, 'They freeze the goddamn ice so you can stand up. If you want to go swimming, go to a swimming pool.' Well, their whole bench would go crazy! You know, 'What's this guy talking to the referee for, before the game,' you know? We just set the tempo."

When I knew Ann Preston, the only love she spared was for the sea. "The sea is cruel," she would say, "but it never lies."

There was a certain amount of uncomfortable shifting about in the room, as everyone disagreed vehemently without saying anything.

Overdosed, Stella left her book on a turkey-work footstool and crossed the huge double parlor. She loved these rooms at this time of day. They had so many windows and French doors, it seemed one giant view of moss-draped live oaks and emerald grass. The old window draperies were the crowning touch with each long valence goblet-pleated at every other repeat of the faded 1930s era floral chintz.

She'd rotated into the point position earlier, eager to cover ground and confident in her abilities, her strength, and that while desert knowledge wasn't applicable in the Colombian jungle, basic survival principles remained the same.
But that was two hours ago and between the ache in her biceps and shoulder that came from swinging the machete and now what she'd forever call 'the tiny frog incident', her confidence was waning.
She hacked at a thick vine and the machete stuck halfway. Her shoulders slumped, and it took all her strength to not drop to her knees in defeat.
Her words from yesterday echoed in her head. You can set me in the middle of nowhere--jungle or desert--with nothing but a knife and the clothes on my back, I'll walk out of there alive.
Well, she'd live as long as she avoided frogs.

A hospital mortuary is never a cheerful place, but it is perhaps least cheerful on a Saturday afternoon. The weekend is not a good time for dying, you should never die anytime between Friday evening and Monday morning. Wednesday is the best day for dying except for some towns in Connecticut where even the barber shops are closed on Wednesday. But as a general rule, if you're going to die, Wednesday is a nice day for it. This was Saturday, and a lot of people had inconsiderately and with absolutely no regard for the calendar died in the hospital that morning and had been taken downstairs to be put on ice.

And around us, then, suddenly there were fireflies, and swirling motes of unidentifiable bioluminescence that seemed to make the darkness no less dark. The ceiling of the basement was draped with more than roots, I saw, with the sticky silken threads of larval glow worms, and I imagined there were zodiac constellations drawn in the arrangement of their deadly lures. Amanda held up her arms, as though she'd summoned this swarm, as though she worshipped or made herself an offering to it. And the basement had, I saw, grown into a cavern, something straight out of A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and forests of oyster-colored mushrooms the size of redwoods towered all around us. I heard the crashing waves of a not-so-distant sea, and Amanda sat down on a rock, and slowly, she lowered her arms.

I hit the snowman with twenty pounds of chocolate.

Let me start this discussion by pointing out that I am not antigun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife.
In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

Rydell picked up Monica's copy of People and found a picture of Gudrun Weaver and the Reverend Wayne Fallon. Gudrun Weaver looked like an actress in her forties. Fallon looked like a possum with hair-implants and a ten-thousand-dollar tuxedo.