Literary Quote of the Day

"We have problems in our country, and many people are praying and waiting for God to do something.  I just wonder if maybe God isn't waiting for us to do something.  And while no one else is capable of doing everything, everyone is capable of doing something."


~ Ronald Reagan, White House Luncheon of National Religious Leaders, April 13, 1982, reprinted in President Reagan's Quoatations

Literary Quote of the Day

"Unlike me, Re-nefer's son had not been able to hide his heart from his mother.  Re-nefer had despised the women of the city since she arrived in Shechem as a young bride.  'Stupid and empty,' she branded them all.  'They spin badly, weave atrociously, dress like men, and know nothing of herbs.  They will bear you stupid children,' Re-nefer had told her son.  'We will do better for you.'"


~ Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

Literary Quote of the Day

Preface to Poor Richard Improved 


"Courteous Reader,
    I have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure, as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors.  This pleasure I have seldom enjoyed; for though I have been, if I may say it without vanity, an eminent author of almanacs annually now a full quarter of a century, my brother authors in the same way, for what reason I know not, have ever been very sparing in their applauses, and no other author has taken the least notice of me, so that did not my writings produce me some solid pudding, the great deficiency of praise would have quite discouraged me."


~ Benjamin Franklin, circa 1758

Literary Quote of the Day

GENEROSITY AND MEANNESS

"To begin then with the first characteristic set forth above, I will say that it would be well always to be considered generous, yet generosity used in such a way as not to bring you honor does you harm, for if it is practiced virtuously and as it is meant to be practiced it will not be publicly known and you will not lose the name of being just the opposite of generous.  Hence to preserve the reputation of being generous among your friends you must not neglect any kind of lavish display, yet a prince of this sort will consume all his property in such gestures and, if he wishes to preserve his reputation for generosity, he will be forced to levy heavy taxes on his subjects and turn to fiscal measures and do everything possible to get money.  Thus he will begin to be regarded with hatred by his subjects and should he become poor he will be held in scant esteem; having by his prodigality given offense to many and rewarded only a few, he will suffer at the first hint of adversity, and the first danger will be critical for him.  Yet when he realizes this and tries to reform he will immediately get the name of being a miser.  So a prince, as he is unable to adopt the virtue of generosity without danger to himself, must, if he is a wise man, accept with indifference the name of miser.  For with the passage of time he will be regarded as increasingly generous when it is seen that, by virtue if his parsimony, his income suffices for him to defend himself in wartime and undertake his enterprises without heavily taxing his people.  For in that way he practices generosity towards all from whom he refrains from taking money, who are many, and stinginess only toward those from whom he withholds gifts, who are few."

~ Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Literary Quote of the Day

Puck:


If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumb'red here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call:
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.


~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Book Giveaway!

Kelly Hashway was the winner of my giveaway of True of Blood!  Thank you all who participated in the contest.

Literary Quote of the Day

Male Criticism on Ladies' Books   
(First printed in the New York Ledger on May 23, 1857)

Courtship and marriage, servants and children, these are the great objects of a woman’s thoughts, and they necessarily form the staple topics of their writings and their conversation.  We have no right to expect anything else in a woman’s book.  

–         N. Y. Times

“Is it in feminine novels only that courtship, marriage, servants, and children are the staple?  Is not this true of all novels? – of Dickens, of Thackeray, of Bulwer and a host of others?  Is it peculiar to feminine pens, most astute and liberal of critics?  Would a novel be a novel if it did not treat of courtship and marriage?  And if it could be so recognized, would it find readers?  When I see such a narrow, snarling criticism as the above, I always say to myself, the writer is some unhappy man, who has come up without the refining influence of mother, or sister, or reputable female friends; who has divided his migratory life between boarding-houses, restaurants, and the outskirts of editorial sanctums; and who knows as much about reviewing a woman’s book, as I do about navigating a ship, or engineering an omnibus from the South Ferry, through Broadway, to Union Park.  I think I see him writing that paragraph in a fit of spleen – of male spleen – in his small boarding-house upper chamber, by the cheerful light of a solitary candle, flickering alternately on cobwebbed walls, dusty wash-stand, begrimed bowl and pitcher, refuse cigar stumps, boot-jacks, old hats, buttonless coats, muddy trousers, and all the wretched accompaniments of solitary, selfish male existence, not to speak of his own puckered, unkissable face; perhaps, in addition, his boots hurt, his cravat-bow persists in slipping under his ear for want of a pin, and a wife to pin it, (poor wretch!) or he has been refused by some pretty girl, as he deserved to be, (narrow-minded old vinegar-cruet!) or snubbed by some lady authoress; or, more trying than all to the male constitution, has had a weak cup of coffee for that morning’s breakfast.

But seriously – we have had quite enough of this shallow criticism on lady-books.  Whether the book which called forth the remark above quoted, was a good book or a bad one, I know not: I should be inclined to think the former from the dispraise of such a pen.  Whether ladies can write novels or not, is a question I do not intend to discuss; but that some of them have no difficulty in finding either publishers or readers, is a matter of history; and that gentlemen often write over feminine signatures would seem also to argue that feminine literature is, after all, in good odor with the reading public.  Granting that lady-novels are not all that they should be – is such shallow, unfair, wholesale, sneering criticism the way to reform them?  Would it not be better and more manly to point out a better way kindly, justly, and, above all, respectfully? or – what would be a much harder task for such critics – write a better book!”

~ Fanny Fern (Sarah Willis Parton), reprinted in The Norton Anthology American Literature

Literary Quote of the Day

"There has been a lot of debate over what Hell looks like.  Christians serve it up Dante style, with caverns of fire and lakes of lava.  Muslims change the names, but they're mostly on the same page.  The Buddhists have Naraka, with its pus rivers and infinite tortures.  Jews have an undesirable piece of real estate where everyone gets Saturdays off and someone's always burning garbage.  But when damned souls of any denomination finally come face-to-face with the real thing what they generally feel is disappointment, and that's the genius of Hell.


Hell falls short of expectations.  Hell disappoints.  Hell underwhelms.  Hell is always worse than you thought it would be.  Tackier.  Cheaper.  Dirtier.  Uglier.  Hell looks like someone slept in it the night before and didn't wash it afterwards: it's soiled, rumpled, stained and unpleasant.  Almost everything in Hell is broken and hardly anything works.  The things that do work have been repaired so poorly, so many times, that they're actually harder to use than before.  Dante got the general gist - he was there, after all - but, being Italian, when it came time to write it up he couldn't resist making it seem romantic.  Hell is about as romantic as a soup kitchen.  A soup kitchen where everyone is naked, dirty and dead."


~ Grady Hendrix, Satan Loves You

Literary Quote of the Day

The Land of Happy


Have you been to The Land of Happy,
Where everyone's happy all day,
Where they joke and they sing
Of the happiest things,
And everything's jolly and gay?
There's no one unhappy in Happy,
There's laughter and smiles galore.
I have been to The Land of Happy -
What a bore!


The Search


I went to find the pot of gold
That's waiting where the rainbow ends.
I searched and searched and searched and searched
And searched and searched, and then -
There it was, deep in the grass,
Under an old and twisty bough.
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine at last...
What do I search for now?


~ Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Literary Quote of the Day

"'...this is one thought that has impressed me, Govinda.  Wisdom is not communicable.  The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.'


'Are you jesting?' asked Govinda.


'No, I am telling you what I have discovered.  Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.  One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.  I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers.  There is one thought I have had, Govinda, which you will again think is a jest or folly: that is, in every truth the opposite is equally true.  For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided.  Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.  When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation.  One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach.  But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided.  Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner."


~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Literary Quote of the Day

The Road Not Taken


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim, 
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


~ Robert Frost, 1916

Literary Quote of the Day

"He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.  They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them.  With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.  Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands.  One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.  Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden.  They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture.  But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make?  They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.  They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."


~ George Orwell, 1984

Literary Quote of the Day

A Psalm of Life


What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist


                    I
Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 
    Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    and things are not what they seem.


                   II
Life is real - life is earnest -
    And the grave is not its goal:
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
    Was not spoken of the soul.


                  III
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 
    Is our destin'd end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
    Find us farther than to-day.


                 IV
Art is long, and time is fleeting,
    And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
    Funeral marches to the grave.


                 V
In the world's broad field of battle,
    In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
    Be a hero in the strife!


               VI
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
    Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act - act in the glorious Present!
    Heart within, and God o'er head!


              VII
Lives of great men all remind us
    We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us 
    Footsteps on the sands of time.


             VIII
Footsteps, that, perhaps another, 
    Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwreck'd brother,
    Seeing, shall take heart again.


              XI
Let us then be up and doing,
    With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
    Learn to labor and to wait.


~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, circa 1838, printed in The Norton Anthology American Literature

Review comments

I have fixed the problem with the review comments links and they will bring you to the right place now!

Literary Quote of the Day

    "I stood in the shallows in a dress that I had never imagined, by a shore I did not know, and stared at the beautiful monster as he moved towards me, graceful and covered in blood.
    I woke gasping for air, hands clutching at the sheets like a lifeline. 'You promised to stay out of my dreams, you son of a bitch,' I whispered."


~ Laurell K. Hamilton, Circus of the Damned

Literary Quote of the Day

"After spending a petless year with only one child still living at home, my parents visited a breeder and returned with a Great Dane they named Melina.  They loved this dog in proportion to its size, and soon their hearts had no room for anyone else.  In terms of mutual respect and admiration, their six children had been nothing more than a failed experiment.  Melina was the real thing.  The house was given over to the dog, rooms redecorated to suit her fancy.  Enter your former bedroom and you'd be told, 'You'd better not let Melina catch you in here,' or, 'This is where we come to peepee when there's nobody home to let us outside, right, girl!'  The knobs on our dressers were whittled down to damp stumps, and our beds were matted with fine, short hairs.  Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter.  'That's what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.'"


~ David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Literary Quote of the Day

"When and where the heart can celebrate each awakening day - that becomes home.  When and where the spirit can mine for nourishment in the little moments - that becomes home.  When and where the mind can distill meaning from the shadows as well as the light - that also becomes home."


~ Priscilla Cogan, Winona's Web

Literary Quote of the Day

Several quotes from Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins:


"Sandwiches were invented by the Earl of Sandwich, popcorn was invented by the Earl of Popcorn, and salad dressing by the Oil of Vinegar.  The moon invented natural rhythm.  Civilization uninvented it."


"So goofy/erotic was the Hawaiian language that the street signs read like invitations to pagan whoopjamboreehoos, and 'nookie' was on the tip of every sober tongue.  Hawaiian was a language that could name a fish 'humuhumunukunukuapua'a' and a bird 'o-o,' and never mind that the bird was larger than the fish."


"And yet the pea under the mattress complained.  It broadcast - peep peep peep - through the most luxuriant stuffing its bruising litany: poverty, waste, injustice, pollution, disease, armaments, sexism, racism, overpopulation; a boring inventory of social ills atop which princess meat could never quite get comfortable."


"Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened.  It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities.  Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes exoteric and therefor prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control.  As for magic, there's none at all because the aim of any social activist is power over others, whereas a magician seeks power over only himself: the power of higher consciousness, which, while universal, cosmic even, is manifest in the intimate."

Sorry for the lack of daily quotes!

Being unable to log into the site for so long because of the technical errors the blogger site was experiencing, I've been thrown off my routine.  Will be back with quotes tomorrow!

Literary Quote of the Day

"I steer her hastily into the kitchen, away from the pile of take-away menus on the hall table.  Then I wish I hadn't.  On the kitchen counter is a stack of old tins and packets, together with a note from my new cleaner, all in capitals:


DEAR SAMANTHA
1. ALL YOUR FOOD IS PAST ITS SELL-BY DATES. SHOULD I THROW AWAY?
2. DO YOU HAVE ANY CLEANING MATERIALS, E.G. BLEACH? COULD NOT FIND ANY.
3. ARE YOU COLLECTING CHINESE FOOD CARTONS FOR ANY REASON? DID NOT THROW THEM AWAY, JUST IN CASE.


YOUR CLEANER JOANNE


~ Sophie Kinsella, The Undomestic Goddess

Literary Quote of the Day

"The body, like all dead bodies, gave the appearance of being particularly heavy as it lay, in the manner of the dead, with its stiffened limbs sunk among the cushions of the coffin and its head permanently bent forward on the pillow, displaying, as dead bodies always do, its yellow, waxlike forehead, the shiny spots on its sunken temples, and the protruding nose that seemed to be pressing down on the upper lip.  Ivan Ilyich had changed greatly.  He had grown much thinner since Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him, and yet, like all dead men, his face had assumed an expression of greater beauty - or rather, of greater significance - than it had worn in life.  The expression seemed to say that what had to be done was done, and done properly.  Furthermore, the expression seemed to be a reproach, or a reminder to the living.  Pyotr Ivanocich found this reminder uncalled for; at any rate it had nothing to do with him.  He began to feel uncomfortable, and so he crossed himself hurriedly - hardly within the bounds of decency, he felt - and went out."


~ Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Six Short Masterpieces by Tolstoy

Literary Quote of the Day

    "MJ-12, Majestic twelve, Majic.  It had started during that golden Cold War summer of 1947.  It had staged the first sighting of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier on June 24 and followed that debut two weeks later with the Roswell 'crash' of alien spacecraft.  The idea was simple enough: convince Stalin that UFO's existed and that the United States was in possession of their technology.  That would keep Uncle Joe on his toes.
    Then, as with so many other government programs, the original plan gave way to bigger things.  Majestic consisted of a top-secret twelve-man directorate (hence the name) that included...top members of the nation's scientific, aerospace, and military communities.  They decided that as long as they were at it, MJ-12 could serve another, even higher purpose: keeping the taxpaying U.S. citizenry alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space, and therefore happy to fund expansion of the military-aerospace complex.  A country convinced that little green men were hovering over the rooftops was inclined to vote yea for big weapons and space programs.
    So what began a half century ago with the towing of some pie-shaped reflective disks behind a camouflaged aircraft over Washington State soon evolved into a 'black' program with a yearly budget running into the tens of millions of dollars.  But Americans are easily bored.  The problem quickly became how do we keep them interested?  After a while, mere sightings of flying saucers just weren't enough.  MJ-12 had to devise more elaborate entertainments: physical evidence, scorch marks in the grass, traumatized animals (easy enough), cars whose batteries had inexplicably gone dead while their occupants were staring google-eyed at the funny lights.  When the thrill of disabled vehicles and freaked-out pets wore off, JF-12 had no choice  but to start providing glimpses of the alien darlings themselves.  This was trickier.  For one thing, it meant finding dwarfs with security clearances.  For this reason, aliens have gotten considerably bigger over the years.


~ Christopher Buckley, Little Green Men

Literary Quote of the Day

LISTEN TO THE MUSTN'TS


Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me -
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.


~ Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Literary Quote of the Day

"I was born on October 21, 1956.  This makes me quite old - half a century and change.  I was born in Burbank, California...to simple folk.  People of the land.  No, actually my father was a famous singer, and you wanna hear something really cool?  My mother is a movie star.  She's an icon.  A gay icon, but you take your iconic stature where you can.  His name is Eddie Fisher, and her name is Debbie Reynolds.  My parents had this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, like with muscle and blood.  This was the main competition I had for my parents' attention, an audience.  People like you.  You know who you are.


My father had many big songs, but perhaps the one he's best remembered for was 'Oh! My Papa,' which I like to call 'Oh! My Faux Pas.'  And my mother, well, she did tons and tons of films, but I think the one she's best remembered for is the classic film Singin' in the Rain.  But she was also nominated for an Oscar for best actress for her role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown but tragically, she lost to Julie Andrews, for her stunning, layered, and moving portrait of Mary Poppins.  Ibsen's Mary Poppins, of course."


~ Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

Literary Quote of the Day

"Shortly after we arrived in Tarawa, there appeared in the back pages of newspapers around the world a small item regarding Kiribati.  The instigator of this tiny tempest in the human-interest media was the English magazine Punch, which published a story about a twenty-one-year-old man from Northampton, UK, named Dan Wilson, who in a cheeky display of tactless ambition, sent a letter addressed to 'The Government, Kiribati,' offering himself for the job of poet laureate.  In his letter, Wilson stressed his range - 'I can write poems about anything you want; happy poems, sad poems, songs, anything' - and noted that for a remuneration package he wished for nothing more than a hut overlooking a lagoon.  Also enclosed was a sample poem, a three-stanza ditty that began: 'I'd like to live in Kiribati/I feel it's the country for me/writing poems for all the people/under a coconut tree.'


The letter, as one would hope, was delivered to the head of government, President Teburoro Tito, who was sufficiently moved to extend an invitation to Wilson to live the simple, literary life in Kiribati, hut included.  That Kiribati is pronounced Kir-ee-bas, which undermines the rhythmic structure of the poem, mattered not, since even in Kiribati it is understood that poems no longer have to rhyme."


~ J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Literary Quote of the Day

How I Learned to (Almost) Love the Sin Lobbyists


    "A couple of years ago, while wondering with some desperation what to write about, I turned on the TV and there was a nice-looking talking-head lady from the Tobacco Institute, manfully (as it were) denying that there was any scientific link between smoking and cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, or athlete's foot.  She was attractive, well-spoken, intelligent and as persuasive as she could be, given the deplorably disingenuous data she was pitching.  I thought: What an interesting job that must be.  Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and go and sell death for a living.
     A few days later I was reading in the paper about some teenage kid who, to judge from his blood alcohol content, had drunk two kegs of beer single-handedly, then got in his pickup truck and careened over the yellow line into a minivan, annihilating an entire Boy Scout troop.  And there at the bottom of the story was a quote from a spokesman for the beer-keg industry saying what an awful tragedy it was, but that no one was more concerned about teenage drunk driving than the beer-keg industry.  I thought: Boy, I bet that guy trembles every time his beeper goes off.
    A few days after that, a 'disgruntled postal worker' went bonkers and blew away his supervisor and a half dozen others with a gun with a name like Hamburger-Maker .44 Triple-Magnum.  And sure enough, the National Rifle Association was right on the case, worrying out loud that if we start outlawing Hamburger-Maker .44s, how long before we outlaw the Swiss Army knife?  I thought: There's another interesting job.
    The idea formed of writing a major, thick, serious, nonfiction study of institutional hypocrisy in America...But I kept coming back to these three yuppie Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Another title came to me: Thank You for Smoking.  And then the mortgage bill arrived, so that settled it.


~ Christopher Buckley, Wry Martinis

Self-published author book reviews!

Understanding the need for more people to recognize the talent of new, self-published authors, I will begin reviewing at least one book each week.  Please see my review policy for details!

Literary Quote of the Day

Okay, not literary but I was in the mood for some humor today so here's some quotes from the comedian Steven Wright:


A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths.



Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.



Don't you hate when your hand falls asleep and you know it will be up all night.

I bought some instant water one time but I didn't know what to add to it.



I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.

I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, "Did you sleep good?" I said "No, I made a few mistakes."

Read more:http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/steven_wright_5.html#ixzz1LOD7u2oM

Literary Quote of the Day

    "Until I saw this particular critter, I had always thought that all centipedes were like those small hundred-legged insects one periodically encounters in North America.  On a nuisance scale, a centipede, at least in my experience, ranked far below a mouse, perhaps just a fraction higher than a cricket.  A Vanuatu centipede, however, is a different beast altogether.  On the nuisance scale, I'd put it up there with a rattlesnake.  A Vanuatu centipede is, to begin with, a carnivore.  Yes, that's right.  Vanuatu centipedes eat meat.  Now, I'm no entomologist, but you'd think that fact alone would be enough to bump it out of the insect classification.  Second, they are venomous.  They kill their prey by injecting it with venom, and have two pincers near their head designed for this very purpose.  And then there's this:  Their legs are venomous too.  Centipedes can have upwards of three hundred legs.  Ponder that, if you will.  Now, three hundred legs, of course, need to be connected to something - something large enough to carry three hundred legs.  You might conclude, then, and rightly so, that Vanuatu centipedes are big, very big.  They can grow to be more than a foot long.  And they are nearly indestructible.  You may think that you've solved the problem by chopping a centipede in two, but in fact, what you have just done is create two angry, scurrying missiles of poison.
    And, as I was now discovering, the centipedes in Vanuatu are hideous to behold.  I had leapt on top of the table and joined Pip in contemplating the horror that was scampering across the floor.  This particular centipede was nearly a foot long.  Even a ladybug of those dimensions would have sent me scooting toward high ground.  A Vanuatu centipede, however, does not have pretty coloring.  It looks remarkably like the Darth Vader of the insect world, armored and menacing, exuding malice.  This, I agreed with Pip, was trouble."


~ J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages

Literary Quote of the Day

"In the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber.  After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors.  Garp was looking for Lumber when he discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions.  Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards.  But this surely depends on where you live, he thought.  In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber?"


~ John Irving, The World According to Garp

Literary Quote of the Day

Frozen Dream


I'll take the dream I had last night
And put it in my freezer,
So someday long and far away
When I'm an old grey geezer,
I'll take it out and thaw it out,
This lovely dream I've frozen,
And boil it up and sit me down
And dip my old cold toes in.


~Shel Silverstein, A Light In the Attic