Literary Quote of the Day

"This - just to pluck an example out of the air - is what I feel at this precise moment.


1. Lonely, tired, frightened, sad, confused and extremely sexually frustrated.
2. Ugly, as hair sticking up in imaginative peaks and shapes and face all puffy from tiredness.
3. Confused and sad as no idea if Mark still likes me or not and scared to ask.
4. V. lovingful of Mark.
5. Tired of going to bed on my own and trying to deal with everything on own.
6. Alarmed by horrifying thought that have not had sex for fifteen million, one hundred and twenty thousand seconds."


~ Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason

Literary Quote of the Day x2

"What business is it of hers?  God, I hate other mothers.  They always have to butt in.  The minute you have a child, it's as if you've turned into a box on an Internet site that says, Please add all your rude and offensive comments here."


~ Sophie Kinsella, Mini Shopaholic

Literary Quote of the Day

    "He didn't have great hopes that people would really evolve out of their bodies in his time.  He just wished they would.  Thinking hard about it, he walked through a park in his shirtsleeves and stopped off at the zoo to watch the lions being fed.  Then, when the rainstorm turned to sleet, he headed back home and was interested to see firemen on the edge of a lagoon, where they were using a pulmotor on a drowned man.
    Witnesses said the old man had walked right into the water and had kept going without changing his expression until he'd disappeared.  Konigswasser got a look at the victim's face and said he'd never seen a better reason for suicide.  He started for home again and was almost there before he realized that that was his own body lying back there.
    He went back to reoccupy the body just as the firemen got it breathing again, and he walked it home, more as a favor to the city than anything else.  He walked it into his front closet, got out of it again, and left it there.
    He took it out only when he wanted to do some writing or turn the pages of a book, or when he had to feed it so it would have enough energy to do the few odd jobs he gave it.  The rest of the time, it sat motionless in the closet, looking dazed and using almost no energy."


~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Welcome to the Monkey House

Literary Quote of the Day

Shorts from Not So Funny When It Happened edited by Tim Cahill:


"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke."  ~ Herman Melville


"I was doing my usual shuffle, trying to convey something in French to a horrified merchant, when my daughter Anna, then eight years old, took me aside and advised, 'Daddy, you need a lot of spit in your mouth to speak French.'  Alas, my drooling has only caused more problems." ~ James O'Reilly


"Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses." ~ Margaret Millar


"It wasn't until we were in college that we realized anthropology is just travel writing about places with no room service." ~ P.J. O'Rourke


"If you're a cowboy and you're dragging a guy behind your horse, I bet it would really make you mad if you looked back and the guy was reading a magazine." ~ Jack Handey


"You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you can do while you're down there." ~ George Burns


"As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life.  Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling?  Sometimes it seemed that way." ~ Jack Handey


"I hope if dogs ever take over the world and they choose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas."  ~ Jack Handey


"I sat in the Delhi airport and watched the big electric clock in the departure hall that tells passengers when to board.  I thought I imagined that time was moving in fits and starts: 1:12 A.M. for fifteen minutes, then 1:27 for another twenty, 1:47...Closer inspection revealed that the clock was not plugged in, and its digits were being flipped manually by a little man in gray overalls whenever the mood took him." ~ Jonah Blank


"Consider the daffodil.  And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff." ~ Jack Handey

Literary Quote of the Day

"'And then,' said a cadaverous-looking personage, near the foot of the table, taking up the thread of the conversation where it had been broken off - ' and then, among other oddities, we had a patient, once upon a time, who very pertinaciously maintained himself to be a Cordova cheese, and went about, with a knife in his hand, soliciting his friends to try a small slice from the middle of his leg.'"


~ Edgar Allen Poe, The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, 18 Best Stories by Edgar Allen Poe

Literary Quote of the Day

"Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees.  How could any one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed.  Let the days move over - sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young."


~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Literary Quote of the Day

"Switters had once read somewhere that according to data accumulated from the black-box flight recorders of crashed aircraft, the last words spoken by pilots, upon realization that they were doomed, was most often, 'Oh, shit!'


What did it say about human frailty, about the transparent peel of civilization, about the state of evolution, about the dominion of body over mind, when, at the moment of their imminent death, modern, educated, affluent men were moved to an evocation of excrement?  That as the ax abruptly fell on their mortal lives, technologically sophisticated commanders of mutimillion-dollar flying machines usually uttered no proclamation of sacred, familial, or romantic love; no patriotic sentiment, no cry for forgiveness, no expression of gratitude or regret, but rather, a scatological oath?


Quite likely, it said very little.  Almost certainly, the word shit was issued without the slightest conscious regard for its literal meaning.  On an unconscious level, the oath might be significant, but one would have to be a fairly fanatical Freudian to propose that it indicated the persistent domination of an infantile fixation on feces."


~ Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Literary Quote of the Day x2

The Year's At The Spring


The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven'
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in His heaven - 
All's right with the world!


~ Robert Browning

Literary Quote of the Day

"The dark of night lies everywhere.
So young the night around,
We see how vast with stars the sky,
Each star as radiant as day.
And if the earth could have its way,
It would sleep on - through Easter Day -
Lulled by the reading of the psalms."


~ The Poems of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Translated from the Russian by Eugene M. Kayden

Literary Quote of the Day

"Odysseus was even more deeply moved, and his tears ran as he held her in his arms, the wife of his heart, so faithful and so wise.  She felt like a shipwrecked mariner, when the stout ship has been driven before the storm and smashed by the heavy waves, but a few have escaped by swimming.  How glad they are to see land at last, to get out of the water and stand upon solid ground all caked with brine!  So glad was Penelopeia to see her husband at last; she held her white arms close round his neck, and could not let him go.  Dawn would have risen upon their tears of joy, but Athena had a thought for them.  She held the night in its course and made it long; she kept Dawn on her golden throne at the end of Ocean, so that she could not yoke up her swift pair, Flasher and Flamer, the colts who bring Dawn with her light to mortal men."


~ Homer, The Odyssey

Literary Quote of the Day

"I said, 'I do not fear those pants
With nobody inside them.'
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them.  But I lied them."


~ Dr. Seuss, What Was I Scared Of?

Literary Quote of the Day

"Grandfather Hawken," I said, "you've been around a long time.  What have you learned in this life?"
He kept staring at the Big Hole Mountains in the west.  His mouth moved, like he was chewing the words before he spit them out.  "I can mend a fence and fix windmills.  Know how to shoe a horse, tan a cow, and stick a pig.  Can roll a real tight Bugle cigarette.  Used to be able to drive a car, but can't anymore."
I thought about this.  It wasn't the answer I had in mind.  "But what's important, Grandpa?  What are the priorities of your value system?"
"Value system?"
"What matters?"
The little bent man squirmed around on the fence, waving his head from side to side.  He lifted himself up on his hands, then lowered himself again.  He seemed angry.  He shook one finger at the sun.  "Do you see that?" he said urgently.  "Do you see what's going on over there?"
"The sun's going down."
His wiry fingers clamped hard on my wrist.  "The sun is going down," he shouted.  "That's a fucking miracle, boy.  A miracle.  It'll be an even bigger miracle if it comes back up tomorrow.  You ain't never going to see anything more amazing than a sunset."  He released my wrist.
Grandpa shook so hard, he almost fell off the fence.
"Now look at this," he demanded.  "Look at it."  Grandpa held his penis in both hands.  It was a giant of penises, a leathery rattlesnake crawling from between his legs; even the head was snakelike.  "This is for sex!  Use it every chance you get...This" - he shook the snake - "and sunsets are all there is.  There ain't nothing else."
"By that do you mean appreciation of nature and romantic love?"
His eyes shook and popped.  "You idiot," Grandpa thundered.  "I mean sex and sunsets.  You take in some of each every day, and you'll never go crazy."
"Are you crazy, Grandfather?" I asked.
"Of course not," he said, stroking the great coil.


~ Tim Sandlin, Sex and Sunsets

Literary Quote of the Day

(Poems in the Edition of 1830, omitted later)
The How and the Why


I am any man's suitor, If any will be my tutor:
Some say this life is pleasant, Some think it speedeth fast,
In time there is no present, In eternity no future, In eternity no past.
We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die, Who will riddle me the how and the why?


The bulrush nods unto its brother.  The wheatears whisper to each other:
What is it they say? what do they there?  Why two and two make four? why round is not square?
Why the rock stands still, and the light clouds fly?  Why the heavy oak groans, and the white willows sigh?
Why deep is not high, and high is not deep?  Whether we wake, or whether we sleep?
Whether we sleep, or whether we die?  How you are you? why I am I?
Who will riddle me the how and the why?  


The world is somewhat; it goes on somehow:
But what is the meaning of then and now? I feel there is something; but how and what?
I know there is somewhat: but what and why?  I cannot tell if that somewhat be I.
The little bird pipeth - 'why? why?'
In the summer woods when the sun falls low, and the great bird sits on the opposite bough,
And stares in his face, and shouts 'how? how?'  
And the black owl scuds down the mellow twilight,  And chants 'how? how?' the whole of the night.


Why the life goes when the blood is spilt?  What the life is? where the soul may lie?
Why a church is with a steeple built:  And a house with a chimney pot?
Who will riddle me the how and the what?  Who will riddle me the what and the why?


~ Alfred Tennyson, Tennyson Poetical Works, Cambridge edition, 1898

Literary Quote of the Day

      "I gave a lot of orientation rides in fighters and continue to do so with the L-39 jet I am fortunate to have today as a 'boy toy.'  It is not uncommon for laypersons to have some concern about flying in a fighter.  The fact that L-39s come with ejection seats as standard equipment is a bit telling, I suppose.  But the reality is the flight will probably be as safe a harbor as any.
      My mother used to fear for my life, flying those dangerous jets.  I've always shared with her that with my luck I'd go in and resign from the Air Force and then be hit by a bus as I left the building.
      In orientation ride situations, I like to remind my passenger of the reality that we all die someday.  In fact, for this particular flight, let's just assume we are going to die in a fiery crash.  What would you like to do between now and then?  Do you want to worry about the inevitable or do you want to enjoy this for all it is worth in the remaining time?  Once again, 'Why die all tensed up?'  In most cases, this causes a chuckle and we get on with the flight."


~ Bob Vosburgh, Lift

Literary Quote of the Day

"She wondered about the yeti.  It didn't make much sense for a mythical monster from the Himalayas to be in the Food Plus Mart freezer.  She hoped the guy the city sent would know how to handle this.  She doubted that pole with the loop of rope would be up to the task.


...He didn't look like much, and as he walked closer, he looked like even less.  He was tall and lanky, with a narrow face.  His hair and skin were blue.  The hair was a tangled mess and could've passed reasonably for seaweed.  He carried a baseball bat over his shoulder.


She didn't comment on his blueness.  Like the inexplicable appearance of th yeti, it didn't seem odd.  Like encountering an elephant at the beach or meeting an Aborigine at the mall.  She wouldn't expect it, but she wouldn't classify it as bizarre as much as unexpected.  her lack of a strong reaction struck her as stranger than anything else.  But Judy made an art out of indifference, so she just chalked it up to not caring."


~ A. Lee Martinez, Monster

Literary Quote of the Day

"Chapter 15


In which the Author describes the Behavior of Government Officials (drunken thuggery), the Peculiar System of Governance (Coconut  Stalinism), the Quality of Government Services (Stalin, at least, got something done), followed by a recounting of the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition, when for nearly Two Months all government activities ceased, not that anyone noticed, followed by the Shocking Conclusion to the competition, when the Ministry of Housing won with a dance that Shamelessly incorporated Polynesian influences, leaving the other Competitors to stew in their Bitter Bile."


~ J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Literary Quote of the Day

"[Selfless love] would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you.  I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind.  Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values.  It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest tribute you can pay to that person."


~ Playboy's interview with Ayn Rand, March 1964

Literary Quote of the Day

(Reposted by request...)


You kick off your shoes and flop onto the bed - landing, of course, among millions of mites...every one of us, including the rich, the pious, and the royal of blood, sleeps each night in colonies of such mites. The ultimate witnesses, the most intimate voyeurs, these mites. What books they might author, what tales they could tell! Imagine the memoirs of a multitude of minuscule malcolm lowrys, expatriates in a martex mexico, soused on dandruff tequila, living and writing under the volcano of love. Jolted by mattress-quakes, buried by thigh-slides, swept away by flash floods of seminal lava, they cling to the linen with their petite pincers, recording with literary objectivity our orgasms, our fevers, our pillow talk, our dreams. Who knows more of our secrets? Who? Nightly, and often by day, they sail with us in the lunar barge, their flake steaks marinated in our tearwater, their breakfast boiled in our sweat, the winds of our farting at play in their hair. They are familiar with wife and mistress, husband and lover, hot-water bottle and fetish, favorite sitcom and favorite drug; have memorized confession, recrimination, prayer, delirium, and that sweet name we cry out in our sleep. our babies are conceived - and born - in their midst; our parents - and someday we ourselves - die in what passes for their arms. Yes, all this: but the mites do not betray us. If they gossip, it is only among themselves. Perhaps they see an order in our messy bed-lives - our tossings and turnings, moans and nightmares, snacks and snores and trading of partners - that we have not discovered yet. Perhaps they regard us as glorious, even; as agents of the raw miraculous, capable at any moment - not in spite of our folly but because of it - of a transcendence that exceeds transformance. As a rule, we do not sing in our beds. We have no need. The mites sing for us. Sing of us. They are our Greek chorus, our geek chorus, choirs of microscopic angels ever ready to dance on the head of a pin. Their appetites are ghoulish, their hunger divine. They are what they eat.


~ Tom Robbins, Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas

True of Blood to be released soon!

I have gotten behind on my daily quotes as I put the finishing touches on my lasted novel, True of Blood.  Read chapter 1 now by clicking on the ebook tab above.

Literary Quote of the Day

"Well, boys and girls assuming you've been paying attention, you now know everything you'll ever need or want to know about the world's most popular adult beverage.  True, we didn't examine from a scientific standpoint the precise physical effects the consumption of beer has on the brain, the belly, and the liver.  Should you crave such information you can always consult your pediatrician - although don't be surprised if he gives you a funny look.  He's likely to look at you strangely even if he's Irish.


There is one other thing.  Should you have nothing better to do than to delve further into the origins of beer, you'll come across some historians who contend that beer was invented in Sumer, the present-day country of Iraq, centuries before it was first brewed in Egypt. The Beer Fairy concedes that the Sumerians did, indeed, ferment a kind of grain drink, but that it would be stretching the point to actually call the slop beer.  The Beer Fairy ought to know."


~ Tom Robbins, B Is for Beer, A Children's Book for Grown-ups, A Grown-up Book for Children

Literary Quote of the Day

"THINGS YOU CAN BUY WITH £20,000


1. Nice car; e.g., small BMW
2. Pearl and diamond necklace from Aspreys plus big diamond ring
3. 3 couture evening dresses; e.g., from John Galliano
4. Steinway grand piano
5. 5 gorgeous leather sofas from the Conran shop
6. 40 Gucci watches, plus bag
7. Flowers delivered every month for 42 years
8. 55 pedigree Labrador puppies
9. 80 cashmere jumpers
10. 666 Wonderbras
11. 454 pots Helena Rubinstein moisturizer
12. 800 bottles of champagne
13. 2,860 Fiorentina pizzas
14. 15,384 tubes of Pringles
15. 90,909 packets of Polo mints"


~ Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic

Literary Quote of the Day

EARLY BIRD


Oh, if you're a bird, be an early bird
And catch the worm for your breakfast plate.
If you're a bird, be an early bird - 
But if you're a worm, sleep late.


~ Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Literary Quote of the Day

"'...I want you to send your people - your Delta Force commandos, who are very good - into Amo-Amas and remove this Florence woman of yours.  Dead or alive, it's no matter for me, but it's time for her to go.  I am not looking to make the next Joan of Arc.  but if you don't come and get her, I will deal with it very soon.  And finally, if you don't help me with these things, you Americans are going to have a very cold winter, yes?'


'Hmm,' Maliq said.  'Do you think they'll go along with it?'


'My dear imam, you must understand - the Americans are idealistic to the point where they must lower their thermostat two degrees.  Then they become very practical.'"


~ Christopher Buckley, Florence of Arabia

Literary Quote of the Day

"I want to tell you that I saved the day.  That with my amazing organizational skills and human empathy, I swept in and fixed everything, amazingly managed to turn Darla from a spoiled, evil bitch into a humble, loving woman who finally understood the value of her love for Jay and that her sexual exploits were simply a cry for love and attention from the one man she feared losing (Jay).  I would like to say that with an eloquent speech on love from me even Nick realized his mistake and forgave me, then spontaneously asked me to marry him, right there, right then, and suddenly a single wedding became a double, and the four of us jetted off to fabulous tropical honeymoons and experienced a bliss that would last the rest of our lives.


None of that happened.  But then, you knew that already, I'm sure."


~ Cara Lockwood, I Do (But I Don't)

Literary Quote of the Day

March 1991


"Six days after the liberation of Kuwait the Kuwaitis were still celebrating outside the U.S. Embassy, firing every available weapon in the air, including the .50-caliber dual-mount machineguns on the Saudi and Qatari personnel carriers.  It's one thing to get plinked on the head by a falling pistol bullet, but a .50-caliber slug plummeting from the sky at terminal velocity could go right through you to the soles of your feet.  One American marine told me that sixteen people had been killed by 'happy fire' so far, but a U.S. Army officer said it was more like a hundred and fifty.  All the press corps' telephone and television satellite up-links were on the roof of the Hilton and rounds were beginning to land up there.  One bullet came down between the feet of ABC executive Neil Patterson, who started handing out helmets and battle gear to everybody on the ABC payroll.  The most dangerous thing I did during the entire war was cook spaghetti sauce on a camp stove on the Hilton roof without wearing my flak jacket."


~ P.J. O'Rourke, Give War a Chance

Literary Quote of the Day

"What a clever trap your Ruling Class set for us," he went on.  "First the atomic bomb.  Now this."


"Trap?" I echoed wonderingly.


"They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops," he said.  "They had your Government borrow so heavily  from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits.  Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice!  No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!"


~ Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus (copyright 1990)