Tales of the City

Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on." The older woman poured herself a glass of sangria. "Screw that," she said quietly. "What?" "Screw that. Wash your mouth out. Who taught you that half-assed existential drivel?

Mona knocked at the wrong time. “Uh…yeah…wait a minute, Mona -- ” Mona shouted through the door. “Room service, gentlemen. Just pull the covers up.” Michael grinned at Jon. “My roommate. Brace yourself.” Seconds later, Mona burst through the doorway with a tray of coffee and croissants. “Hi! I’m Nancy Drew! You must be the Hardy Boys!

Garbage, you know, is very revealing.It beats the shit out of tarot cards.

Somepeople drink to foregt, I smoke to remember" Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City...

Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave. She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave. "Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian.

Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City)

Mona … lots of things are more binding than sex. They last longer too.

We’re gonna be … I mean people like you and me … we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

if you’re going to be degenerate, you might as well be a lady about it, don’t you think?

we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

Could you conjugate that? To sleaze. I sleaze. You sleaze. We all have sleazen.

Well … everything gets old after a while. I personally get a little sick of wrecking my liver at The Lion for the privilege of tricking with some guy whose lover is in L.A. for the weekend.

Well … not exactly together. He’d buy a sofa and I’d buy a couple of matching chairs. One has to plan on divorce at all times … still, it was a landmark of sorts. I’d never gotten to the furniture-buying stage before.

Small world, huh?” She grinned lewdly. “Not particularly. I’d say you’ve just run out of material.

There’s a theory,” said Anna, handing him a cup of tea as she climbed back into bed, “that we are all Atlanteans.” “Who?” “Us. San Franciscans.” Edgar grinned indulgently, bracing himself for another yarn. Anna caught it. “Do you want to hear it … or are you getting stuffy on me?” “Go ahead. Tell me a story.” “Well … in one of our last incarnations, we were all citizens of Atlantis. All of us. You, me, Frannie, DeDe, Mary Ann…” “Are you sure she’s out of the building?” “She’s gone to her switchboard. Will you relax?” “O.K. I’m relaxed.” “All right, then. We all lived in this lovely, enlightened kingdom that sank beneath the sea a long time ago. Now we’ve come back to this special peninsula on the edge of the continent … because we know, in a secret corner of our minds, that we must return together to the sea.” “The earthquake.” Anna nodded. “Don’t you see? You said the earthquake, not an earthquake. You’re expecting it. We’re all expecting it.” “So what does that have to do with Atlantis?” “The Transamerica Pyramid, for one thing.” “Huh?” “Don’t you know what dominated the skyline of Atlantis, Edgar … the thing that loomed over everything?” He shook his head. “A pyramid! An enormous pyramid with a beacon burning at the top!

The rules of a well-ordered life were never enough when other people refused to obey them.

Uh … you know, strict.” “With occasional lapses into lacto and ovo, huh?” “Yes. Except on weekends and nights when I’m stoned. Then I’m a steako-lacto-ovo … or maybe a porkchopo-lacto-ovo…

A half-hour conversation with Binky was like eating a Whitman Sampler in one sitting.

THERE WERE MORNINGS WHEN VINCENT FELT LIKE THE last hippie in the world. The Last Hippie. The phrase assumed a kind of tragic grandeur as he stood in the bathroom of his Oak Street flat, fluffing his amber mane to conceal his missing ear. If