The silverware

   The de Luce silverware was kept in a dark folding cabinet which, when opened, presented a remarkable array of fish forks, toddy ladles, mote spoons, marrow scoops, lobster picks, sugar nips, grape shears and pudding trowels, all arranged in steps, like so many silvery salmon leaping up the stony staircase of a whisky-colored stream somewhere in Scotland.

Alan Bradley
A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel  (2011)

The things we do for love

   The things we do for love. Look at über-city-girl Princess Diana schlepping off to Balmoral in her green wellies to convince Prince Charles there was nothing she liked better than standing around in the pissing rain all day, while men who smelled of horses and women who looked like them took pot shots at innocent pheasants.

Tess Stimson
The Adultery Club (2008)

Flavor of the month

   I followed her out, and she immediately lit up. She sucked the smoke in all the way down to her toes and blew it out her nose. "This cigarette tastes like ass," she said. I wasn't sure what ass tasted like, but she looked like she would know, so I was willing to take her word for it.

Janet Evanovich

Explosive Eighteen (2012)

My favoritest joke

Porkypine:  Owl, if I tells you a joke for the vaudeville act, do I git paid?
Owl:           Yep! Two gumdrops per line.
Porkypine:  This is a  four line joke - - - A man bought his li'l boy a fur coat (that's two gumdrops)
Owl:           Two it is.
Porkypine:  The li'l boy wore it to school, (that's two more)
Owl:           Two more
Porkypine:  The teacher say: "My, aren't you warm?" (That's another two) Chomp - - -
Owl:           Right - - - Six up to now. [pause] Well? What's the last line? The payoff? The boff?
Porkypine:  Ding bing it! I never can remember the last lines of jokes - - - chomp - - - chomp - - -

Walt Kelly
Pogo September 8, 1950

Beans

Hey you fellas, how 'bout some beans? You want some beans? Goin' through some mighty rough country tomorrow. You better have some beans.

Howard (Walter Huston)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
screenplay by John Huston

The language of honour

In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other.

Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe (1820)

Happiness, imagined

I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

Charles Dickens
Great Expectations (1861)

Good smells

In the old days, good smells filled the kitchen (misleading smells, since our mom's cooking strategy was to throw a couple of raw things into a greased pan and wait to see what happened, like watching strangers on a date).

Karen Russell
Swamplandia! (2011)

Ha ha, only serious

     "And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest."
     "Master! I said, shocked.
     "So it is, Adso. And there are even richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve."
     "Really? I exclaimed, amazed. Then, seized by doubt, I added, "But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!"
     "The other skull must be in another treasury," William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.

Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose (1983)
Sixth Day, Prime

A liberal perspective

   Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
   This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
   It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

President Dwight Eisenhower
speech: "The Chance for Peace"
April 16, 1953
Quoted in Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton

Eisenhower on Social Security

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

President Eisenhower
Nov. 8, 1954
letter to his brother, Edgar

http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1147.cfm

Too late

She had a pale face, rather taut, dark hair that was a little wild. She was wearing a double-breasted scarlet coat with brass buttons, gray flannel slacks, pigskin clog sandals, and no stockings. There was a necklace of cloudy amber around her throat and a bandeau of old-rose material in her hair. She was in her middle thirties, so it was too late for her to learn how to dress herself.

Raymond Chandler
"No Crime in the Mountains" (1941)

A 90-minute film that plays for two hours

If the Coens have taken two hours to do what hardly anyone else could do at all, isn't it churlish to ask why they didn't take less time to do what everyone can do?

Roger Ebert
--the last line from his review of The Man Who Wasn't There

A geography lesson from Keith Richards

   "One thing was playing Chicago blues; that was where we took everything that we knew, that was our kickoff point, Chicago. Look at that Mississippi River. Where does it come from? Follow that river all the way up and you'll end up in Chicago."

Keith Richards with James Fox
Life (2010)

The unreliable narrator

     "Yes, he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all."
     I acquiesced.
     "There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me."
     I was pleased with the compliment. There had been times when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.
     "Yes," he continued, staring at me thoughtfully, "you will be invaluable."

Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1916)

Beautiful detachment and stern justice

We stood in the rain and were taken out one at a time to be questioned and shot. So far they had shot every one they had questioned. The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Abstract words...were obscene

   "We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."
   I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Three doctors

   Before he came back three doctors came into the room. I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success. These were three such doctors.

Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Gesta Romantorum by firelight

   The boys, and for that matter the men, would sit as quiet as church mice while the marvels of the story were unfolded, and, when the unpredictable narrative had come to an end, they would look towards Reverend Sidebottom [...] to have the story explained. Reverend Sidebottom would draw a deep breath and plunge into his task, explaining how the certain King was really Christ, and the barking dogs zealous preachers, or how the white cow was the soul and her milk represented prayer and supplication. Sometimes, indeed generally, the unfortunate vicar was hard put to it to find a moral, but nobody ever doubted that his explanations were the right ones; and anyway most of his listeners were soon asleep.

T. H. White
The Sword In The Stone (1939)

The dog boy and the dogs

He talked to them, not in baby-talk like a maiden lady, but correctly in their own growls and barks. They all loved him very much, and revered him for taking thorns out of their toes, and came to him with their little troubles at once. He always understood immediately what was wrong, and generally he could put it right. It was nice for the dogs to have their god with them, in visible form.

T. H. White

The Sword In The Stone (1939)

Like a decade?

"I am here because this is a young and virile race, not dry and decadent like ours."

Dracula (Lon Chaney, Jr.)
Son of Dracula (1943)

He pronounces it /duh-KADE-nt/.

Laconic grunts, indeed

   "Going huntin', mister?"
   You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. "Huh," "hun," and "Hi!" in their various modulations, together with "sure," "guess so," "that so?" and "nuts!" will meet almost any contingency.
   Bond, slinging the strap of his rifle over his shoulder, said, "Hun."

Ian Fleming
"For Your Eyes Only" (1959)

Self-pity and freedom

   Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.

Johnathan Franzen
Freedom (2010)

Not seriously

   It was one of those leather-padded bars, bogus-masculine, and still, because of its newness, smelling like the inside of a new motor-car. It was made to look like a Tyrolean Stube by a big stone fire-place with a roaring log fire and cartwheel chandeliers with red-stemmed electric "candles." There were many wrought-iron gimmicks -- wall-light brackets, ashtrays, table lamps -- and the bar itself was "gay" with small flags and miniature liquor bottles. Attractive zither music tripped out from a hidden loud speaker. It was not, Bond decided, a place to get seriously drunk in.

Ian Fleming
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)

Ok, I'll bite

"You know what? said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus.

Ian Fleming
"Octopussy" (1965)

That's tellin' him

All right. You're askin' for trouble. And you're gonna get it too. And don't you forget it, either.

The Cisco Kid TV series
"Rustling" (1950)
Season 1, Episode 3
screenplay: J. Benton Cheney

The French

The French took great pride in their arrangements for the signing of the peace treaty. The event was to be an exercise of two qualities at which they excelled -- grandeur and revenge.

John Milton Cooper, Jr.
Woodrow Wilson - A Biography (2009)

When you come to a conclusion, jump

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality'. As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits -- barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

Ian Fleming
Goldfinger (1959)

Tempus non fugit

"I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime."

Shirley Jackson
Life Among The Savages (1953)

Here's chloral hydrate in your eye

"To your health. And may our enemies -- if they exist -- be unconscious of our purpose."

Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
written by
Ethel Lina White (story)
Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (screenplay)

Chivalry

"My father always taught me: Never desert a lady in trouble. He even carried that as far as marrying Mother."

Gilbert (Michael Redgrave)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
written by
Ethel Lina White (story)
Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (screenplay)

Freud, forgive me

    "The freud will see you now," said the nurse, and Mrs. Garvy tottered into his office.
    His traditional glasses and whiskers were reassuring. She choked out the ritual. "Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses."
    He chanted the antiphonal, "Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble."

C. M. Kornbluth
"The Marching Morons" (1951)

The verb at the end comes

    I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1899)

"He was small and thin..."

He was small and thin, next door to a runt, but wiry-looking, and had black eyes and hair and a moustache which pointed due east and west. He looked and acted harassed, and as soon as he shook hands with me darted off elsewhere. His wife, in spite of her New York clothes and her 1938 hair-do, looked like one of those colored pictures in the National Geographic entitled "Peasant Woman of Wczibrrcy Leading a Bear to Church."

Rex Stout
Over My Dead Body (1939)

Ironing

   I looked for ironing, but there was none. When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don't need ironing.

Janet Evanovich
Three To Get Deadly (1997)

Not to put too fine a point on it...

   "A girl by the name of Eva Raymond. She's a lady of leisure."
   "Professional?"
   "Well, what you might call a gifted amateur with commercial tendencies."

Erle Stanley Gardner
The Case Of The Smoking Chimney (1943)

Weather matters

    And then, to add to Mr. Merrill's appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes -- a perfectly wholesome type, but entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had told her that health and energy and the Lord's work are harder to come by in bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire.

John Irving
A Prayer For Owen Meany (1989)

Not to talk like

    Before the man had a chance to shut him out, Riley said, "May I come in?" He said it carefully, proud of his deep and strong voice, one which was only slightly tainted by his years in the South. He'd worked hard to keep the cracker out of his voice, feeling that he had had enough problems without the added weight of a redneck voice, but there were some things Riley did not know, and one of them was that, even though he no longer talked like a redneck, what he did talk like was a redneck straining hard not to talk like a redneck.

Gordon Eklund
"White Summer In Memphis" (1972?)

The consensus on smiling

"I have researched all the memoranda about smiling," General Toad said, riffling the pages stacked before him, "and the consensus at policy is that smiling is not in accord with national sentiment. So that issue must be ruled closed."

Philip K. Dick
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1974)

Intangibles

     "Probably we will take him on an inspection tour of the ship before it takes off and give him, absolutely free, a picture of himself standing in front of it, with the pilot's own signature signed across the bottom by some female clerk."
    "Chiseling from kids. Bah!"
     "Not at all," answered Montgomery, in hurt tones. "Intangibles are the most honest merchandise anyone can sell. They are always worth whatever you are willing to pay for them and they never wear out. You can take them to your grave untarnished."

Robert Heinlein
The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949)

One thing troubles me

"Jabah, I have at last completed all my laboratory experiments. My death by pollen extract is definite. I am ready to exact my tribute from the wealthy of the world. They will either pay tribute to me or die, and yet one thing troubles me..."

--Bob Kane/Bill Finger
"The Batman Meets Doctor Death"
Detective Comics No. 29
July 1939

Generalities

"All generalities are stupid."

--Michael B. Kaye
4.august.1978

Just trying to earn a living

   I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

--Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

Winnie the Pooh 05: The White House Budget Process

   "I just like to know," said Pooh humbly. "So as I can say to myself: 'I've got fourteen pots of honey left.' Or fifteen, as the case may be. It's sort of comforting."
   "Well, let's call it sixteen," said Rabbit.

-- A. A. Milne

Winnie the Pooh 04

   "When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
   "What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
   "I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today? said Piglet.
   Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
   "It's the same thing," he said.

-- A. A. Milne

Winnie the Pooh 03

And all Rabbit's friends-and-relations spread themselves about on the grass, and waited hopefully in case anybody spoke to them, or dropped anything, or asked them the time.

-- A. A. Milne

Colloquy, Pogo style

Owl: Let's start at the beginnin' again an' let's keep our fierce
an' indomidouble tempers under con-trol.
Churchy: Alright--Let's be gentlemens an' considerant of each other's
frailities an' foibobbles.
Owl: Hee hee--How you do go on--I allus was considerant
of yo' faults an' unspeakable habits.
Churchy: An' I is ever been forbearin' 'bout yo' snoopy ways an' turpitoods.
Owl: [taking off his glasses] Long as we's bein' such gent'mens
we kin insult each other freely without fear of hurtin' the other's feelin's.
Churchy: [poking Owl in the chest] Yes an' you is a ball-eyed bull bat.


-- Walt Kelly
Positively Pogo
(c) 1955, -56, -57

Wishing to be...

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the oportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

--Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections (2001)
(hardback, p. 465)

Walt Kelly on first tries

"If you're a professional, writer or artist, you can get anywhere from 75 to 85 percent of what you're aiming at in your first try. A lot of artists spend most of their time trying to get the other 15 to 25 percent. I don't. I'd rather go for another 75 to 85 percent."

Walt Kelly
quoted in Phi Beta Pogo, page 25

Theater: the director's role

"My idea of a director is a chap who puts me in the middle of a stage and shines a bright light on me."

-- Sir Ralph Richardson