“So far, being dead is about as much fun as a barbed-wire G-string.”
Richard Kadrey, The Kill Society
“Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes.”
Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire.
“According to their biographies, Destiny’s favored children usually had their lives planned out from scratch.”
Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein
Wow, thanks to all the participants over the time that this thread has been up and running. I’ve got a nice source for what will doubtlessly be a fun bit of bedside reading.
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
– David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
They’ve been visited by the Suck Fairy. It’s always a sad thing to find that something you enjoyed as a child and remember with fondness turns out to be pretty stinky when you’re an adult.
“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic, and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”
- Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
“Left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.”
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
“When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.”
― Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning
A Plague of Angels by P F Chisholm.
“Years are what they are.”
Wait Till Next Year: The Story of a Season When What Should’ve Happened Didn’t and What Could’ve Gone Wrong Did, by William Goldman and Mike Lupica.
“The sun was going down behind the Big Burger when the alligator came flying in the drive-through window.”
The Pope of Palm Beach by Tim Dorsey
It was a four-day journey by train from the coast to the desert where the Tower of Babel rose like a tusk from the jaw of the earth.
- Senlin Ascends, by Josiah Bancroft
“He had four names at various times.”
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated by Lisa Hayden
Jerry Redlands opened his eyes in freefall.
John Rolfe had rented the house for seventy-five a month, which sounded extortionate but was something close to reasonable given the way costs had gone crazy in the Bay area since Pearl Harbor.
Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe
With loss of Eden til one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat
Sing heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning, how the heav’n and earth
Rose out of chaos.
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
I’m trying to improve my mind.
“Aliette is cooking cauliflower once again.”
Mandelbrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska
The galaxy is a dumpster fire.