Quote From Your Current Reading

[satan]

Ooooo, someone's gotten the new Gaiman!

Originally posted by erik_kosberg
How often do you get to say a name like “Mr. Bobo” aloud?

Actually, every day, if i wanted to . . . the family i'm staying with now have a ferret named Bobo . . .


I love you when you're standing on the lawn
Peering at something in a tree: "It's gone.
It was so small. It might come back" (all this
Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss).
I love you when you call me to admire
A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire.
I love you when you're humming as you pack
A suitcase or the farcical car sack
With round-trip zipper. And I love you most
When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost
And hold her first toy on your palm, or look
At a postcard from her, found in a book.

Vladimir Nabokov : Pale Fire

[erik_kosberg]

From The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks:

Leviticus Cauldhame, my father’s eldest brother, emigrated to South Africa and bought a farm there in 1954. Leviticus, a person of such weapon-grade stupidity his mental faculties would probably have improved with the onset of senile dementia, left Scotland because the Conservatives had failed to reverse the Socialist reforms of the previous Labour government: railways still nationalised; working class breeding like flies now the welfare state existed to prevent the natural culling by disease; state-owned mines . . . intolerable. I have read some of the letters he wrote to my father. Leviticus was happy with the country, though there were rather a lot of blacks around. He referred to the policy of separate development as ‘apart-hate’ in his first few letters, until somebody must have clued him in on the correct spelling. Not my father, I’m sure.

Leviticus was passing police headquarters in Johannesburg one day, walking along the pavement after a shopping expedition, when a crazed, homicidal black threw himself, unconscious, from the top storey and apparently ripped all his fingernails out on the way down. He hit and fatally injured my innocent and unfortunate uncle whose muttered last words, before his coma became a full stop, were: ‘My God, the buggers’ve learned to fly. . . .’

[ms_n]

...I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

[quasar]

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

"Resume", Dorothy Parker. Read in The Collected Works of Dorothy Parker

[ms_n]

"And once you've wound up a clock, there's something frightful in the way it keeps on going at its own relentless pace. Its hands move steadily round the dial as if they had a mind of their own. Tick-tock, tick-tock! Bit by bit they move, and tick us steadily on toward the grave.
Some stories are like that. Once you've wound them up, nothing will stop them; they move on forward till they reach their destined end, and no matter how much the characters would like to change their fate, they can't. This is one of those stories. And now that it's all wound up, we can begin."

Phillip Pullman, Clockwork

[arianej]

Of the does who had escaped with him from Efrara, Vilthuril always seemed to Bigwig the most strange and enigmatic, the hardest to understand. Not that she was unfriendly or standoffish. On the contrary, she was on good terms with every rabbit in the warren and was often ready enough for a chat: about such things as the weather, the grass, and the horses which galloped on the Down--about anything, really, which could give rise to no disagreement and upon which anyone could express a harmless view. She was a good mother and devoted to her mate, Fiver. She and Fiver had, in fact, discovered their affinity almost before the return from the Efrafran expedition: and during the night of Woundwort's attack--which, it will be recalled, Fiver had spent lying unconscious about Efrafrans on the floor of the Honeycomb before awakening to defeat Vervain without striking a blow--Vilthuril had been distracted and almost mad with anxiety on his account.

In dealings with Vilthuril, everyone sensed a certain reserve on her part and knew that she and Fiver spent much time in their inward world, the world of the mystic. No one resented this, since they instinctively recognized its validity, and anyway, as Bluebell remarked, so long as Fiver could emerge from it for the short time he required to demolish rabbits like Vervain, it seemed al to the good.

Not that Vilthuril could not speak seriously and command the respect and attention of others when she wanted to; and since she did not want to very often, other rabbits usually piped down simply not to miss the opportunity of getting a bit of the real Vilthuril while it was going. This they seldom or ever regretted.

One evening, in quite a full Honeycomb and certainly to his surprise, she remarked quietly to Hazl, almost as though they were alone together, "Haz Hyzenthlay ever told you about the underground river in Efrafra?"

--Tales from Watership Down, by Riachard Adams.

[soxfan[$]]

Listen Paul, if you're smart you'll do exactly what he wants you to do. Trust him. He's made an awful lot of money for all of us ... all of us before and belive me, he'll do it again. Now if he wants to hire that girl you hire her and if he wants to hire a three-headed gorilla go out and find one and hire it.

-- All About Jazz, screenplay by Robert Arthur and Bob Fosse

[quasar]

Isn't it All That Jazz?

Janice

[quasar]

Darkness was, and darkness was good. As was light. Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeline L'Engle

[dandj]

But regarding me, I believe wholeheartedly in the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not fixeth that which is not brokeneth. The Army, however, was created to wreck things that aren't broken, a mindset that bleeds over into its personnel policies. Actually, nobody in the Army believes there are personnel policies, just a standing order that as soon as a soldier becomes acclimated to a certain place, masters a certain job, or appears happy where they're at, it's time to jerk their ass through some new knothole.

Professionally, I was very content where I was. Socially, I had serious problems.

Private Sector by Brian Haig

[quasar]

I'd forgotten just how powerful '"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman' really is until I re-read it this afternoon. Ellison can really write.

The Ticktockman: very much over six feet tall, often silent, a soft purring man when things went timewise. The Ticktockman.

Even in the cubicles of the hierarchy, where fear was generated, seldom suffered, he was called the Ticktockman. But no one called him that to his mask.

You don't call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called the Master Timekeeper to his mask. It was safer that way.

"This is what he is," said the Ticktockman with genuine softness, "but not who he is. This time-card I'm holding in my left hand has a name on it, but it is the name of what he is, not who he is. The cardioplate here in my right hand is also named, but not whom named, merely what named. Before I can exercise proper revocation, I have to know who this what is."

To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks, all the commex, even the mineez, he said, "Who is this Harlequin?"

He was not purring smoothly. Timewise, it was jangle.

However, it was the longest speech they had ever heard him utter at one time, the staff, the ferrets, the loggers, the finks, the commex, but not the mineez, who usually weren't around to know, in any case. But even they scurried to find out.

Who is the Harlequin?

[quasar]

NOW IT IS DONE. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.

...

And the story remains to be told, the story of how the Giants won the 1951 pennant in the National League. The Tale of their barreling run through August and September and into October...Of the final day of the season, when they won the championship and started home with it from Boston, to hear on the train how the dead, defeated Dodgers had risen from the ashes in the Philadelphia twilight...Of the three-game playoff in which they won, and lost, and were losing again with one out in the ninth inning yesterday when - Oh, why bother?

...

The second pitch - well, when Thompson reached first base he turned and looked toward the left-field stands. Then he started jumping straight up in the air, again and again. Then he trotted around the bases, taking his time.

Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.

"Miracle of Coogan's Bluff", Red Smith, from Home Run: The Best Writing About Baseball's Most Exciting Moment.

[quasar]

Perhaps that's why, with Duke Snider, there's always a periodic urge to look for reassurance in the numbers, the home runs, the strong anchoring presence in center field. Why there's almost a tangible sense of relief to open Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract and see that under "Peak Value" Duke Snider is listed as the sixth best center fielder of all time - behind Mantle, Cobb, Mays, DiMaggio, and Speaker, which is the appeoximate equivalent of finishing behind Einstein and Newton on your physics final.

David Hinckley in Cult Baseball Players: The Greats, the Flakes, the Weird, and the Wonderful

[quasar]

"Do I understand correctly you've had some sort of female trouble?"

No, most of my troubles have been with males. Cordelia bit her tongue. "I had a placental transfer, let me see, three plus," she had to count it up on her fingers, "about five weeks ago."

"Excuse me, a what?"

"I gave birth by surgical section. It did not go well."

"I see. Five weeks post-partum." He made a note. "And what is your present complaint?"

I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts ... it was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay. "Fatigue," Cordelia managed at last.

"Ah." He brightened, and entered this factoid on his report panel. "Post-partum fatigue. This is normal." He looked up and regarded her earnestly. "Have you considered starting an exercise program, Lady Vorkosigan?"

Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

[theeye]

A word as to the title. In the Preface to my Human Knowledge I said that I was writing not only for professional philosophers, and that 'philosophy proper deals with matters of interest to the general educated public.' Reviewers took me to task, saying they found parts of the book difficult, and implying that my words were such as to mislead purchasers. I do not wish to expose myself again to this charge; I will therefore confess that there are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling. On this ground I do not claim that the essays are popular; and if not popular, then 'unpopular.'

-- From the Preface to Bertrand Russell's Unpopular Essays

[rmthunter]

"Religions come and go. They all start sounding alike after a time. What should anyone find amusing abouit this one?"

"It's still growing, and it contains some unusual features. For one thing, it was founded here in Virtu, and it seems to be spreading across the border to the first world."

Seaga shrugged.

"Virtu has always existed, in one form or another. The technology of the Verite only provided it a local habitation and a name. It may well be that all religions have taken their origins in Virtu. For what is it but the collective unconscious of the race?"

Donnerjack, Roger Zelazny and Jane Linskold

[rmthunter]

As a seventeen-year-old waiter and porter in your hotel
I was such a bumbly American boy giraffe
and you were so impatient with me but you strove honorably
to contain your impatience so I wouldn't be terrified
and your twinkle, though fierce, somehow saved me from cowering.
Tell us, Mark, what kind of twinkle was it exactly?

"Olivier Bergmann" in Jab, Mark Halliday

[quasar]

I picked up a little toy bat and crouched over as far as I could, my front elbow resting on my front knee. The rules of the game say that the strike zone is between the batter's armpits and the top of his knees "when he assumes his natural stance." Since Gaedel would bat only once in his life, whatever stance he took was, by definition, his natural stance.

When Eddie went into that crouch his strike zone was just about visible to the naked eye. I picked up a ruler and measured it for posterity. It was 1.5 inches. Marvelous.

"A Can of Beer, A Slice of Cake - and Thou, Eddie Gaedel" by Bill Veeck from Baseball: A Literary Anthology

[rmthunter]

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy. Mr. Spicer's mixture may please his contemporary audience or may, and this is more probable, lead him to write better poetry of his own. But I am strongly reminded as I survey this curious amalgam of a cartoon published in an American magazine while I was visiting your country in New York. The cartoon showed a gravestone on which were inscribed the words: "HERE LIES AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN." The caption below it read: "I wonder how they happened to be buried in the same grave?"

Federico Garcia Lorca
Outside Granada, October 1957

from "After Lorca" in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

[ms_n]

...'I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.'
'Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? "Prove all things"... to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.'
'If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully" There would be nothing to hope for.'

For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom.

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

[erik_kosberg]

From Oscar G. Richard III’s excellent Kriegie: An American POW in Germany (“Kriege” was the Americanization of “Kriegsgefangener,” the German word for prisoners of war):

Inevitably, of course, a few inmates at Stalag Luft I received Dear John letters. An RAF pilot received one from his wife in Liverpool, informing him she had been living with a private. “...But please do not cut off my allowance, though,” she wrote. “He doesn’t earn as much as you...” Another kriegie was told by his wife: “I gave your golf clubs to a German colonel, a prisoner of war in a camp near here. I hope you don’t mind.” He wrote his wife, instructing her to get his “goddamn clubs” back and not to “give anything to the goddamn Germans.” He later heard that his country club had canceled his membership “for not being a gentleman.”

Damn fine book; see if your library has it.