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

According to Chekhov...

When you're thirsty, and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean, that's faith. When you start to drink and finish only a glass or two, that's science.
-- Anton Chekhov

Verbing

I seem to be a verb.
-- Buckminster Fuller

This sentence no verb.
-- Douglas Hofstadter

Verbing weirds language.
-- Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

Winnie the Pooh 02

Pooh enquires into metaphysics:

"Hallo, Rabbit," he said, "is that you?"
"Let's pretend it isn't," said Rabbit, "and see what happens."

-- A. A. Milne

Winnie the Pooh 01

In which Pooh explains:

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

-- A. A. Milne