Quotes from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“There's some heinous fuckery goin' on mon.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“She's so small, yet she contains so much evil.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Shoes off in the whale! And don't try and make a break for the anus.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Animals might put up with that smiley shit, but people will eventually kill you for it.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“It's about average for us. Behavior always draws more than survey. We're the sexy ones,' Nate said with a grin.

Amy snorted. 'Oh, yeah, you guys are the Mae Wests of the nerd world.'

We're action nerds,' Nate said. 'Adventure nerds. Nerds of romance.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feed pulled to.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Nate had been born and raised in British Columbia, and Canadians hate, above all things, to offend. It was part of the national consciousness. "Be polite" was an unwritten, unspoken rule, but ingrained into the psyche of an entire country. (Of course, as with any rule, there were exceptions: parts of Quebec, where people maintained the "dismissive to the point of confrontation, with subsequent surrender" mind-set of the French; and hockey, in which any Canadian may, with impunity, slam, pummel, elbow, smack, punch, body-check, and beat the shit out of, with sticks, any other human being, punctuated by profanities, name-calling, questioning parentage, and accusations of bestiality, usually-coincidentally- in French.)”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“They were both lean and blond and weather-beaten, and one evening, as they were portaging gear from their respective Zodiacs, Libby unzipped her survival suit and tied the sleeves around her waist so she could move more freely. Nate said, "You look good in that."

No one, absolutely no one, looks good in a survival suit (unless a Day-Glo orange marshmallow man is your idea of a hot date), but Libby didn't even make the effort to roll her eyes. "I have vodka and a shower in my cabin," she said.

"I have a shower in my cabin, too," Nate said.

Libby just shook her head and trudged up the path to the lodge. Over her shoulder she called, "In five minutes, there's going to be a naked woman in my shower. You got one of those?"

"Oh," said Nate.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a," she said in yawnspeak, a language - not unlike Hawaiian - known for its paucity of consonants.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while."

"So you don't really have a theory?"

"Clueless."

"You lying bag of fish heads."

"I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?"

"I'm not getting paid."

"See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Growl, you live in a slime lair and maintain an identity as the mysterious overlord of an undersea city, you command a fleet of meat dreadnaughts with crews of humanoid whale people, and you're currently reclining in a pulsating mass of gelatinous goo that looks like it escaped from hell's own Jell-O mold--so excuse the fuck out of me if I question your motives.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“You don't hurry a thinker, and you don't talk to him when he's thinking. It's just inconsiderate.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“[Acknowledgments] I recommend them all for further reading, but when you're finished, you may have to read several of my books and watch a lot of TV just to get stupid enough to function in the modern world again.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“[Conservation] Barring that, just yell at people randomly to stop killing whales. It could catch on. Really.
("Would you like fries with that?"
"Shut up and stop killing whales!"
"Thank you. Drive through, please.")”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Fine, fuck it," Clay said, tossing the plate into the yard. The chicken parts bounced nicely, breading themselves with a light coating of sand, ants, and dried grass. "When did chicken become like plutonium anyway, for Christ's sake? You can't let it touch you or it's certain fucking death. And eggs and hamburgers kill you unless you cook them to the consistency of limestone! And if you turn on your fucking cell phone, the plane is going to plunge out of the sky in a ball of flames? And kids can't take a dump anymore but they have to have a helmet and pads on make them look like the Road Warrior. Right? Right? What the fuck happened to the world? When did everything get so goddamn deadly? Huh? I've been going to sea for thirty damned years, and nothing's killed me. I've swum with everything that can bite, sting, or eat you, and I've done every stupid thing at depth that any human can -- and I'm still alive. Fuck, Clair, I was unconscious for an hour underwater less than a week ago, and it didn't kill me. Now you're going to tell me that I'm going to get whacked by a fucking chicken leg? Well, just fuck it then!”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Ninety-five percent of all the species that have ever existed are now extinct, so don’t look so goddamn smug. —GERARD RYDER”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“[Author's Notes] As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters...)”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Evolution doesn’t really have a destination. It’s just dicking around with possibilities.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“there comes a point where you’ll find something out, where you’ll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you’ll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you’re only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you’ll ever be.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“She glanced over her shoulder to look at the forty-foot cabin cruiser where Captain Tarwater posed on the bow looking like an advertisement for a particularly rigid laundry detergent - Bumstick Go-Be-Bright, perhaps”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“The next day the weather was blown out, with whitecaps frosting the entire channel across to Lanai and the coconut palms whipping overhead like epileptic dust mops.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“From the slope of Haleakala, the Old Broad watched the activity in the channel with a two-hundred-power celestial telescope and a pair of "big eyes" binoculars that looked like stereo bazookas on precision mounts that were anchored into a ton of concrete.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him.
"I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days." Why, why had he told her? Why? Now she'd rattle down the mountain in her ancient Mercedes that looked like a Nazi staff car, sit in the audience, and ask all the questions that she knew in advance he couldn't answer.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“(He reasoned: A well-formed bottom hanging in space is just a well-formed bottom, but you hook up a well-formed bottom to a whip-smart woman and apply a dash of the awkward and what you’ve got yourself is…well, trouble.)”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Clair put down her knife and pickle, then wiped her hands. As she came toward Clay she pulled a large bobby pin from the back of her hair, and her long, thick locks cascaded down her back. She took Clay’s right hand and kissed each of his fingertips, licked his thumb, then took his index finger in her mouth and made a show of removing it slowly and with maximum moisture. Clay looked at the floor, shaking. “Baby,” she said as she placed the bobby pin firmly between Clay’s wet thumb and index finger, “I need you to go over to that wall and take this bobby pin and insert it ever so firmly into that electrical outlet over there.” Clay looked up at her at last. “Because,” she continued, “I know that you aren’t mad at me and that you’re just grieving for your friends, but I think you need to be reminded that you aren’t invulnerable and that you can hurt even more than you do now.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

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Popular quotes

“I heard a noise on the back patio and opened the door. The rabbit was there in a black metal cage. It was big, not some fluffy little ball of fur, but a big, ugly rabbit. It stood on its hind legs and sniffed the air.

“Yes, you smell that,” I told the rabbit. “That’s the smell of your enemy. Get a good whiff. We are not friends.” It could probably smell the apple I still held, not me. I bit off a piece and threw it into the cage, sending it a very mixed message considering the speech I’d given. “Just keeping you on your toes.”

“Who are you talking to”
― Kasie West, quote from P.S. I Like You

“It's the good minds that find difficulty in committing themselves”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters

“The baby regarded Mike gravely as she discoursed to it about a poor drowned woofum-wuffums, and did the bad man treat it badly, then. The baby belched eloquently.
“He belches in English!” I remarked.
“Did it have the windy ripples?” cooed Mike. “Give us a kiss, honey lamb.”
The baby immediately flung its little arms around her neck and planted a whopper on her mouth.
“Wow!” said Mike when she got her breath. “Shorty, could you take lessons!”
“Lessons my eye,” I said jealously. “Mike, that’s no baby, that’s some old guy in his second childhood.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God

“What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.
“The night. It’s got its own set of rules.”
“Day’s got rules too.”
“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.” They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time.
“I don’t understand,” Danny said softly.
“I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”
“But that’s life,” Danny said.
“That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Live by Night

“It was then that he started his novel The People Immortal, and when I read it later, many of its pages seemed to me very familiar. He found himself as a writer during the war. His pre-war books were nothing more than searching for his theme and language. He was a true internationalist and reproached me frequently for saying “Germans” instead of “Hitler’s men” when describing the atrocities of the occupiers.’ Ehrenburg was persuaded that it was Grossman’s all-embracing world view which made the xenophobic Stalin hate him.”
― Vasily Grossman, quote from A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army

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