Literary Quote of the Day

"...we must persist in the quest for united action to counter global warming and a weaponized world.


('Weaponize' is my favorite new verb.  The pen is mightier than the sword - until you weaponize your ballpoint to fight a man with a scimitar.)"


~ P.J. O'Rourke, Peace Kills America's Fun New Imperialism

Literary Quote of the Day

"Miss Lick watches me surface and blow.  She grins as I scrabble for the guttered side of the pool.  'It's amazing that you and I are so much alike, isn't it?'  I kick off on my back, paddling away from her, grinning.

"She's right.  We each appear totally alone in our lives.  I'm the shy, isolated dwarf creeping in and out of my shabby room, living only through my throat and my inherited work.  She is the muscular monolith, cut off by brass, stalking around in her old man's ambition, too imposing in finance and physique for the regular commerce of talk and touch.  We choose to seem barren, loveless orphans.  We each have a secret family.  Miss Lick has her darlings and I have mine.  All we've really lacked is someone to tell.  Now she tells me, and I tell all to these bland, indifferent sheets of paper.  The only point where our narrow tracks converge is her bid to turn my darling into one of hers."

~ Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

Literary Quote of the Day

"...what I mostly noticed was his hair.  He kept it sheared to almost a military cut, but in the back it came down in a straight fan to his shoulders.  Today they call this style a mullet.  In 1985 I'd never seen a mullet before, had no idea what a mullet was, what it was called, or why someone might choose to endure such a thing except for the simple thrifty pleasure that comes from having two haircuts on one head.  All I knew was that it looked monumentally stupid."


~ David Liss, The Ethical Assassin

Literary Quote of the Day

She’d embraced evil; she’d found it lacking.  She was the sinner in search of the impossible salvation; she thought that only the uncorrupted and incorruptible policeman could restore her essential goodness.  She had spotted something conflicted about Inspector Patel.  She believed that he was virtuous and honorable, but also that she could seduce him; her logic was such that she thought of his virtue and his honor as transferable to her.  Nancy’s illusion was not uncommon – nor is it an illusion limited to women. It is an old belief: that several sexually wrong decisions can be remedied – even utterly erased – by one decision that is sexually right.  No one should blame Nancy for trying.

~ John Irving, A Son of the Circus

Literary Quote of the Day

INTERMISSION
(Backstage with the players)

"Pocket, you rascal, you've trapped me in a comedy."
"Well, for some, it is, yes."
"When I saw the ghost I thought tragedy was assured."
"Aye, there's always a bloody ghost in a tragedy."
"But the mistaken identity, the vulgarity, the lightness of theme and paucity of ideas, surely it's a comedy.  I'm not dressed for comedy, I'm all in black."
"As am I, yet here we are."
"So it is a comedy."
"A black comedy - "
"I knew it."
"For me, anyway."
"Tragedy, then?"
"Bloody ghost is foreshadowing, innit?"
"But all the gratuitous shagging and tossing?"
"Brilliant misdirection."
"You're having me on."
"Sorry, no, it's pikeman's surprise for you in the next scene."
"I'm slain then?"
"To the great satisfaction of the audience."
"Oh bugger!"
"But there's good news, too."
"Yes?"
"It remains a comedy for me."
"God, you're an annoying little git."
"Hate the play, not the player, mate.  Here, let me hold the curtain for you.  Do you have any plans for that silver dagger?  After you're gone, I mean."
"A bloody comedy - "
"Tragedies always end with tragedy, Edmund, but life goes on, doesn't it?  The winter of our discontent turns inevitably to the spring of new adventure.  Again, not for you."

~ Christopher Moore, Fool

Literary Quote of the Day

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

Exposed - a new book in the Eliana Brennan series coming soon!

Eliana believes she has gained control over her newfound powers but that's put to the test as a new danger finds her and the ones she loves.  It seems more people than she thought know her secret and she has to determine who she can trust and who she can't.  With enemies both in the States and in Egypt hunting her, she struggles to maintain her humanity as the power of the Essence inside of her grows.