“If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.”
“I've seen more intelligence in the crotch lice of harem whores.”
“I can be most colorful and inventive when I am angry.”
“By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.”
“May the IRS find that you deduct your pet sheep as an entertainment expense.”
“The netherworld is timeless and unchanging, and boring -- much like a doctor's waiting room.”
“The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.”
“Nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism.”
“Slowly and gently, Augustus Brine explained to the king of the Djinn about the illusion created by motion pictures. When he finished, he felt like he had just raped the tooth fairy in front of a class of kindergartners.”
“One day the good times had to keep on rolling, and all of life's horseshit would turn to circuses.”
“Rachel could not believe what she was hearing. Accepting that her magic worked was a huge step, yet she was speaking to the evidence. But to be offered the power to rule the world? She wasn't sure her career in exercise instruction had prepared her for this.”
“Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.”
“In business, as in politics, the public is ever so tolerant of those who slime.”
“In Breeze’s business one got used to running across the skeletons in people’s closets. If Billy’s skeleton wore women’s underwear, it didn’t really matter. Homosexuality on Billy Winston was like acne on a leper.”
“Everyone at the bar turned toward The Breeze and waited, as if the next few words he spoke would reveal the true meaning of life, the winning numbers of the lottery, and the unlisted phone number of God.”
“For the tourist, immersed in the oblivion of vacation spending, Cypress Street provided a bonanza of curious gifts to prove to the folks back home that they had been somewhere. Somewhere where they had obviously forgotten that soon they would return home to a mortgage, dental bills, and an American Express bill that would descend at the end of the month like a financial Angel of Death. And they bought. They bought effigies of”
“He had tapped into the Zen of ignorance, the enlightenment of absurdity.”
“The garlic bread lay there between them, steaming with implications. They, of course, must both eat it or neither could. Garlic bread meant garlic breath. There might be a kiss later, maybe more. There was just too damn much intimacy in garlic bread.”
“Creatures of the night were rising from their resting places and venturing forth to feed on their unsuspecting victims.”
“To say that Effrom was not a particularly good cook was an understatement akin to saying that genocide is not a particularly effective public relations strategy.”
“Die Behauptung, daß Effrom nicht besonders gut kochen konnte, war eine Untertreibung von ähnlichem Kaliber wie die Feststellung, daß es sich bei Völkermord um eine nicht besonders erfolgversprechende PR-Strategie handele.”
“»Du hast Heiden vernichtet? Ich dachte, die Erdgeister seien wohlgesinnt.«
»Jeder hat mal Aussetzer.”
“Das Leben war Handeln, es gab keinen Frieden diesseits des Grabes.”
“»Das Prinzip Moral verstehe ich nicht.«
»Das überrascht mich nicht im geringsten.«”
“doch ihre Gegenwart hatte in ihm stets das Gefühl ausgelöst, daß seine eheliche Treue lediglich eine absurde Wahnvorstellung war.”
“This is what made a book great, she thought, that you could read it over and over and never get tired of it.”
“Ever notice most people are major pains in the ass? I’d rather save myself the trouble of dealing with them and just avoid being around them to begin with. (Ravyn)”
“My Dearest Love,
As I sit here writing, I wish nothing more than to have you with me. The days have gone slowly without your tender gaze upon mine. I am weak without you and do not know how I can survive in this state. The scent of your hair, the touch of your lip, the rose of your cheek all lay engraved in my touch, my sight, my scent, my mind and my heart. I am committed to you with all that I am, and I am nothing without you. Tonight I lay awake recounting our lover’s meets and I agonize over the insignificant distance between us. Yet, it so pains me to have you this short distance away. Might I be a fool to feel this way? And if a fool I am, then it is for you; for you would make any man a king’s fool, my queen. I pray thee sleep well, with dreams of your one true love and may he be me, for the love of my eternal life is the one that breathes life into my soul and that is you and only you. I bid thee sweet dreams and sweet kisses on thy cheek and thy lip and thine eyes, that I should be so fortunate to keep them on mine lip every night.
Ceaselessly Yours,
David Chios”
“[Karen Lundegaard] was quite frail, debilitated by metastatic breast cancer, which she had long known she had but for which she had been unable to get adequate treatment because she lacked medical insurance. ("If you mention anything about me," she said, "tell people that.")”
“I like the term "decedent." It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. "Don't say stiff, corpse, cadaver," scolds The Principles and Practice of Embalming. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don't say 'keep.' Say 'maintain preservation.'…"Wrinkles are "acquired facial markings." Decomposed brain that filters down through a damaged skull and bubbles out the nose is "frothy purge.”
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