Page 42

So I totally stole this from a different group I'm in and I thought It would be fun do it here to. I like that it gives a little insight into what the books are about.

Basically you just put up a (NON-SPOILER) paragraph from page 42 from whatever book you're reading at the moment.

like so:

The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch

My mother's understanding should have brought me closer to her but in adult life I found we were estranged. We were each faultlessly polite whenever we met but nothing of importance was ever uttered between us, and later when my considerable success had deluded me into believing I had mastered the real world, my attitude mellowed from resentment into an affectionate contempt. Poor Mama, I would thing, so plain, so dumpy, so unfashionable. so provincial-what did she know of life when she had barely ventured from her rural backwater since the age of sixteen? The only crisis she had had to surmount had been her mother-in-law's determination to live in sin with a sheep farmer, and even that droll little inconvenience had been smoothed aside by my father who played the hero and visited his mother regularly in her Swansea asylum.

Stay Awake - Dan Chaon

When he first started sleeping in the house alone, he had found it comforting to have a little music playing when he tried to go to bed, or maybe the sound of the television, The Weather Channel, just the chatter of voices--but soon it was the video games and the computer as well, multiple programs stacked on top of one another, and before long there was a semicircle of electronic devices around the sofa bed where he slept. It was as if they were projecting a small force field around him. It wasn't a powerful force field, but it was at least enough to allow him to rest for a little while.

FYI: This is from a LibraryThing Early Reviewer book of short stories which is due to be released on 2/7/12. I love it so far!

"In Chapter 11 we investigate Borel sets in more detail. In particular, we shall classify Borel sets by defining a hierarchy of ω₁ levels. For that we need however a weak version of the Axiom of Choice that is not provable in ZF alone. At this point we mention the lowest level of the hierarchy (beyond open sets and closed sets): The intersections of countably many open sets are called G_δ sets, and the unions of countably many closed sets are called F_σ sets. "

Set Theory by Thomas Jech

>3 cpg: cpg:

I love the limpid prose and the poignant, melancholy note of 'not provable in Zermelo-Fraenkel alone'. A literary gem!

#3: I like the idea of open sets and closed sets with intersections and unions, not to mention Axioms of Choice. You never know what scientists are going to get into behind closed doors.

The Borgias by Jean Plaidy

And when on the following day, hearing the sound of horses' hoofs, she looked out from her window, and saw the Cardinal riding away from the palace, her first impulse was to call him, but that of course would have been undignified. He had come alone, which was unusual, and he had not seen HER which was unusual still. For what reason would he come to Monte Giordano if it were not to see his little daughter?

"The sites in south-eastern Europe and the Levant produce a large number of figurines, most of which are female. This does not mean that male iconography is comparatively slight: it generally takes the form of erect phalluses, of varying sizes and carved in a range of materials, which occur in great numbers upon many of the same sites. Though they have attracted far less attention than the figurines (in Marija Gimbutas's famous book, the female statuettes are dealt with in scores of pages, the phalluses in two), they were obviously of great importance."

Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles

See, mathematicians don't have all the fun.

"We do not need Gabriele d'Annunzio's lewd estheticism at all to point out where civilization's literary man is on principle not an opponent of war. He finds fault with this war because he sees it as a German war, an historical enterprise of Germany, as an outburst of German "protest", because this war carries a German stamp, its activity, its great deeds, are German. He does not find fault with it to the extent that he sees it as a war of civilization against the barbaric stubborness of Germany."

Reflections of a non-political man, Thomas Mann, 1918

Fear made him hurry now; yet, even so, he paused on the threshold of the house and turned back to look at the footprints on the grass: they were still plainly visible, although the warmth of the rising sun was beginning to blur their edges. (It did not strike him as odd that his own footsteps, which had crossed the lawn again and again, had left no similar trace.)

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

The phone rang again. And again. Four times now. No answer. He cursed her for not having an answering machine, for not keeping up with the times.

Half-Past Dawn by Richard Doetsch

She slapped at my hands and cussed me - she could cuss somethin fierce when she wanted to, and she wanted to every time somebody crossed her - but I didn't pay much attention. I got the bedpan under her slick as a whistle, and, like they say, everythin came out all right. When it was done, I looked at her and she looked at me and neither of us had to say a thing. We knew each other of old, you see.

Dolores Claiborne Stephen King.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory. After leaving the hospital, she went back to life as usual. She'd never loved the city, so almost every weekend she took the children back to Clover, where she worked the tobacco fields and spent hours churning butter on the steps of the home-house. Though radium often causes relentless nausea, vomiting, weakness, and anemia, there's no record of Henrietta having any side effects, and no one remembers her complaining of feeling sick.

To install Windows 7, simply boot from the upgrade DVD (or other media, sucha as a bootable USB flash drive), and then follow the remaining steps as described on the preceding pages. If you get an Invalid Product Key error when you enter the product key (step 3), proceed without entering a product key. After setup finishes (including downloading updates and rebooting as required) open the Start menu and type activate. Select Activate Windows, enter your product key, and after a few moments you should see an Activate Was Successful message.

Page 42 from Windows 7: Inside Out by Ed Bott

"Federal Agent, working a fraud investigation.Chaibongsai was old school, a retired beat cop. White-collar crime was enough to cool his curiosity. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, those crimes he would've found interesting. Fraud...I believe his exact words were "Better you than me ,buddy.""

The 7th Month by, Lisa Gardner

Nobody but I even did him the kindness to call him a dirty boy, and bid him wash himself, once a week; and children of his age seldom have a natural pleasure in soap and water. Therefore, not to mention his clothes, which had seen three months' service in mire and dust, and his thick uncombed hair, the surface of his face and hands was dismally beclouded. He might well skulk behind the settle, on beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house, instead of a rough-headed counterpart to himself, as he expected.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The American Academy of Pediatrics has confirmed that ingestion of phthalates can occur when children mouth, suck or chew on phthalate-contining toys or other objects. Thought the academy acknowledges that these sources of exposure are difficult to quantify directly, it noted that this type of "non-dietary ingestion can be expected to increase total exposure by an order of magnitude or more" and that "in the United States and Canada, this uncertainty in predicting exposure levels, especially in very young children and infants, has led to the removal of all phthalates from infant bottle nipples, pacifiers, teethers and infant toys intended for mouthing. DINP has been substituted for the more toxic DEHP in many other toys intended for older children."

Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie

"I don't recall much of my childhood," she told him. "It's been such a full rich life ever since, I haven't felt the need to dwell on that simpler time. Life, with whatever it has brought -- university one decade, the Throne Ministry of Oz the next. The cultivation of roses and prettibells one year, house arrest another -- well, daily life has always seem distracting enough. Childhood? It's a myth."

Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire

"We described how the Academy was transferred from Athens to Alexandria in Egypt, and how the Emperor Augustus, having killed Cleopatra, founded two centres of learning, Alexandria and Rome. Theodosius, the king who ruled during the time of the People of the Cave (the 'Seven Sleepers of Ephesus'), moved the Academy from Rome back to Alexandria."

From The Meadows of Gold by Mas'udi

"We want to show our visitor that the Soviet education system is one of the best in the world."
The director's voice had become weak again.
---"I wish you'd given me some warning."
Austin stepped forward.
---"No warning. No fuss. No ceremony. No preparations. I want to poke around, see what you get up to. And see how things work. Forget I'm even here."

Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

Oddly enough, Gill Sans is itself a curiously sexless font. It began to take shape when Gill was living in the Welsh mountains in the mid-1920s. Here he tried out sans serif forms in his notebooks and on signs too guide tourists around the monastery in Capel-y-ffin. In his autobiography, Gill explained that sans serif was the obvious choice when 'a forward-minded bookseller of Bristol asked me to paint his shop fascia'. The long wooden sign in question, for Douglas Cleverdon, led to something else - for after seeing a sketch of these letters, Gill's old friend Stanley Morison commissioned him to design an original sans serif for Monotype.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield

>11 oldstick:

Love that book. :)

***

"One of his buddies, Rhodes from Shreveport, noticed him looking. He dared Shaftoe to go in there and sit down at that bar. Then another private, Gowicki from Pittsburgh, double-dared him!"

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
p. 42 (mmpb edition)

Auntie Glug hasn't lived in Africa since 1967, but she still dresses like a Kenyan settler woman of a certain era--men's clothes, work boots, a red handkerchief tucked into her sleeve--and she smokes like a soldier. The boxes of photos and letters that I dig out from under the stairs smell of her cigarettes but also of my grandfather's pipe tobacco, the home-grown, home-cured crop he used to hang in his garage in England. The smell of rum and earth are as fresh for me as the instant memory this scent retrieves of his guffawing, irreverent laugh.

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

Our own palaces, the mighty Hofburg in the heart if Vienna and my beloved Schonbrunn, set some distance apart from Vienna, just as Versailles is some distance from Paris, do not compare in magnificence. But Schonbrunn is more beautiful, my heart reassures. Yes, at least to me. It's scale has remained fit for humans. Here, surely one must have wings and fly about like a god or godess. Or a humble bird ignorant of the achievements of humans.

Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund

By the time the foreigners came from overseas, its paramount leader, Powhatan, had tripled its size, to about eight thousand square miles. Tsenacomoco stretched from the Chesapeake Bay to the Fall Line, the bluffs at the edge of the Appalachian plateau. In its scores of villages lived more than fourteen thousand people. Europeans would have been impressed by those numbers; Michael Williams, a historical geographer at Oxford argued that the eastern U.S. forest may have been more populous in 1600 than even "densely settled parts of western Europe."

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann

"There were carefully produced graphics on these websites, with towers thrusting out from the flat map of India, their different heights announcing the amount and concentration of personal wealth in the country. Bombay, now known as Mumbai, had the tallest tower, which made sense. There, India's richest man Mukesh Ambani (who, in a piece of news concocted by the Indian media, had become the world's richest man in October 2007, ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) planned to build a skyscraper in the most expensive area of the city. Sixty stories high, it would have just twenty-seven floors because of its vertiginously high ceilings. And the only residents in the building apart from the Ambani family would be their retinue of 600 servants."

The Beautiful And The Damned: A Portrait Of The New India - Siddhartha Deb

Overwhelmed, Marge sank down on the nearby bench. Annie stood silently beside her, remembering her first view of the ocean. Marge sate, lost in her own thoughts-Mother must have felt like this the first time we saw the Northern lights. It seemed a lifetime ago.

Beyond The Bougainvillea , by Dolores Durando

Thus the negative construction of self was as important a feature of self representation for settler colonies of occupation where race and the idea of an alien or decayed civilization were a feature of colonial discrimination.

Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts

"Luther's grand movement, and the very idea that knowledge could be accessible by individuals without resorting to a conduit provided by an intervening authority, was made possible by a 1451 technological invention: the printing press. For the first time, books could be mass produced, permitting knowledge and its attendant power to be spread widely."

Fool Me Twice: Fighting The Assault On Science In America - Shawn Lawrence Otto

"No really, no," James conceded, growing increasingly perturbed for having allowed himself to be so easily led down the garden path. He was about to suggest they go and try the phone number on the card, when they were approached by a slender, dark haired youth. His solemn expression made him appear older than he was, and his bearing gave James to know he was a soldier or had been; he had seen the sober look and clipped walk far too many times not to recognize it now.

Avalon: The Return of King Arthur by Stephen Lawhead

He fell silent. When he closed his eyes his head spun. He'd not realized how weary he'd become. It was a moment before he understood she was speaking to him. He shook himself, straightened.

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

Digory’s hand was shaking as he opened his penknife and cut out a long strip of turf on the bank of the pool. The soil (which smelled nice) was of a rich reddish brown and showed up well against the green. “It’s a good thing one of us has some sense,” said Polly.

The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis (Kindle edition)

This place was, of course, a paradise for a boy to be in. The Wart ran about like a rabbit in its own complicated labyrinth. He knew everything, everywhere, all the special smells, good climbs, soft lairs, secret hiding-places, jumps, slides, nooks, larders and blisses. For every season he had the best place, like a cat, and he yelled and ran and fought and upset people and snoozed and daydreamed and pretended he was a Knight, without stopping. Just now, he was in the kennel.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

My men came in the middle of the afternoon. The sun was already low in the west where it would be dazzling Ivann's men. I spent some moments with Osferth, telling him what he must do and then sending him with six men to rejoin the monks and the priests. I gave him time to reach them, and then, as the sun sank even lower in the winter sky, I sprang my own trap.

Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell. Book 6 in his Saxon series.

Page 42 of the book I'm reading now is blank, so I'll take a paragraph (the only one, actually) from page 43.

"From the sightlines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith, fervor and despair. Most of all there was the sense of knowing that when you drew a breath you were breathing history along with the air, or the smoke - but that doesn't mean you knew what history was, or would be. History was being made in the instant, which said nothing about what would be included in the books yet to be written, or left out of them, as if what goes in and what goes out stays the same. These names made history in 1968: John Carlos, Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith. They were shouted around the world. Which still echo, which is barely a name at all? "Still the spirit of '68," John Lydon, born to the world as Johnny Rotten, sang in 1979 with his band PiL, when 1968, not a concept but a year, a real time, seemed much farther away than, in this era of media anniversaries, it does now. The song was "Albatross"; the singer sounded beaten down by history, 1968 a huge bird around his neck, but he also sounded as if he knew the beating wings were the wind at his back."

When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening To Van Morrison - Greil Marcus

A braver man than Vernon Dursley would have quailed under the furious look Hagrid now gave him; when Hagrid spoke, his every syllable trembled with rage.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

I'm reading on a kindle but the page numbers are the same as for the print version.

"The Camera drops from the flags to the Einsteins and passes from the Einsteins to the much-decorated General Staffs in the background. All at once and simultaneously the two Field Marshalissimos shout an order. Immediately, from either side, appear baboon technicians, with fully motorized equipment for releasing aerosols. On the pressure tanks of one army are painted the words SUPER-TULAREMIA, on those of their opponents, IMPROVED GLANDERS, GUARANTEED 99.44% PURE. Each group of technicians is accompanied by its mascot, Louis Pasteur, on a chain. On the Sound-track there is a reminiscence of the baboon-girl. Give me, give me, give me detumescence... Then these voluptuos strains modulate into 'Land of Hope and Glory,' played by massed brass bands, and sung by a choir of fourteen thousand voices."

Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley

Some authors recommend attempting to estimate process parameters of an unstable (out-of-control) process. These types of estimates are sometimes referred to as "performance" parameters of the process (AIAG). However, very little, if any, useful information about a process can be gained from analyzing an unstable process (Wheeler and Chambers , page 130). First of all, there is no well-defined output distribution. By definition, out-of-control means either the process average, or standard deviation, or both, are changing. How can one characterize a moving target that is changing shape in a capricious manner and attempt to

Measuring Process Capability

"But little time we had for watching them. For now we had come to the real danger of our journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance until at last we could dare to drop upon its surface."

The First Men in the Moon - H.G. Wells

The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien

Before going to sleep the previous night I had spent a long time in puzzled thought and also in carrying on inward conversations with my newly found soul. Strangely enough I was not thinking about the baffling fact that I was enjoying the hospitality of the man I had murdered (or whom I was sure I had murdered) with my spade. I was reflecting about my name and how tantalising it was to have forgotten it...

Sometime after his arrival in South Queensferry, Herdman had started his boat business, towing water-skiers and such like. Siobhan didn't know how much it cost to buy a speedboat. She'd made a note to this effect, one of dozens listed on the pad back at the table.

From A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin

Cassandra couldn't help herself. She curled up on her side in the centre of the camp bed. It was the perfect place for reading, cool and quiet and secret. Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never knew quite why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong.

From The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

But Daniel couldn't shake the man's words. He had read the Gospels. Wasn't it true that Jesus had commanded us to cast aside our worldly belongings? Mathew 19:21: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor." And hadn't Paul written in Timothy 6:10 that the love of money was the root of all evil?

The Man Who Quit Money.

"It's horrible.I can't believe it."
"Thats just what I think. I can't believe it." Abby releases Megan, wiping her eyes. "I just tell myself, this isn't really happening. It's not. It's not even possible."

Come Home by, Lisa Scottline

They didn't laugh until they were out of sight. They had to walk down the long straight street past Shea's pub with its sour smell of drink coming out on to the street from behind its dark windows, past Birdie Mac's sweet shop where they had spent so much time choosing from jars all their school life. Across the road to the butcher's where they looked in the window to see back at the reflection of Hogan's Outfitters and realise that Sean Walsh had gone back inside to the empire that would one day be his.

Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy

>44 johnsimpson:

Thanks! I had forgotten all about this. :)

***

On that first day of housekeeping and last day - although I don't yet know it's the last - of my life as a low-wage worker in Key West, Carlie is in a foul mood. We have been given nineteen rooms to clean, most of them "checkouts," as opposed to "stay-overs," and requiring the whole enchilada of bed stripping, vacuuming, and bathroom scrubbing. When one of the rooms that had been listed as a stay-over turns out to be a check-out, she calls Millie to complain, but of course to no avail. "So make up the motherfucker," she orders me, and I do the beds while she sloshes around the bathroom. For four hours without a break I strip and remake beds, taking about four and a half minutes per queen-sized bed, which I could get down to three if there were any reason to. We try to avoid vacuuming by picking up the larger specks by hand, but often there is nothing to do but drag the monstrous vacuum cleaner - it weighs about thirty pounds - off our cart and try to wrestle it around the floor. Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of "Bam" (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with "butyric" - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic here challenges me to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathrooms, or at least the dark ones that I can see.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America - Barbara Ehrenreich

"They'll never figure out how I'm going to steal those diamonds! I've got everyone completely baffled! No one has yet discoved how I manage to fly with these artificial wings!"

Thought balloon of The Vulture
Essential Spider-Man, Volume 1
Steve Ditko and Stan Lee
Panel 3, Page 42

"My mind begins to sift through the possibilities. The slim chance remains Marnee could still be here in these woods, lost or injured. She may have removed this sock herself for some reason, but my experience and the concern on the faces of the patrol officers tell me otherwise. Someone very recently drove a vehicle up here and parked it in the turnaround. In all likelihood, Marnee left with that same someone. Most likely taken by force."

The Blue Hallelujah by Andy Straka

"I watched the way she put it on. The rear locking pin snapped in first, then she pulled out the other two, settled the golden ellipse down over her forehead, moved it slightly to seat the pins and let them slide home. Almost at once her face began to visibly change, in a way I found oddly difficult to grasp."

Time Pressure by Spider Robinson

"Why Angry Man do that?" the troll asked. Gustav charged at the creature, but it grabbed him in mid-run and lifted him into the air. The troll spun the prince upside down and rammed him headfirst into the ground with a pile-driver-like maneuver.

-The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by, Christopher Healy

"Assassination of Court Members - One of the reasons this whole plot has been difficult for me to suss out is that there has been relatively little assassination of Court members in the history of the Checquy. Given that it's a centuries-old militant organization that operates under a shroud of secrecy with a plethora of baroque (and sometimes rococo) traditions and bureaucracy, and that most members are trained to kill and equipped with supernatural capabilities, and that members of the Court wield more authority with a terrifyingly free hand, you might expect there'd be more internal violence.
But no."

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

After Hegemony by Robert O. Keohane

Any genuinely Marxian theory of world politics begins with an analysis of capitalism. According to Marxist doctrine, no smooth and progressive development of productive forces within the confines of capitalist relations of production can persist for long. Contradictions are bound to appear. It is likely that they will take the form of tendencies toward stagnation and decline in the rate of profit, but they may also be reflected in crises of legitimacy for the capitalist state, even in the absence of economic crisis. Any "crisis of hegemony" will necessarily be at the same time--and more fundamentally--a crisis of capitalism.

The next morning, by the time I could see the sun erupting like lava over the blazing horizon. I had pretty well made up my mind. There was no way I could keep the Negro imprisoned under such deplorable conditions for ten more days. He might well die. And I realized, too, that my anger with the children was unreasonable. The slave had made his own way to our island. What could they have done? All they were guity of was showing human kindness. and hiding him from me.

The Woman at The Light by, Joanna Brady

"it's hard to forget when you gotta stare at it," Lula said. " Now that i know it's there i can't see anything else. It's like Rudolph with the red nose."

Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

I hate seemingly violent nuts, i thought as i got on the Belt Parkway. Especially ones who really seem to know what they're doing.

Tick Tock by James Patterson

In their great Council at Amaurot, to which there are three sent from every town once a year, they examine what towns abound in provisions and what are under any scarcity, that so the one may be furnished from the other; and this is done freely, without any sort of exchange; for according to their plenty or scarcity they supply or are supplied from one another; so that indeed the whole island is, as it were, one family. When they have thus taken care of their whole country, and laid up stores for two years, which they do to prevent the ill-consequences of an unfavorable season, they order an exportation of the overplus, of corn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle; which they send out commonly in great quantities to other nations. They order a seventh part of all these goods to be freely given to the poor of the countries to which they send them, and sell the rest at moderate rates. And by this exchange, they not only bring back those few things that they need at home (for indeed they scarce need anything but iron), but likewise a great deal of gold and silver; and by their driving this trade so long, it is not to be imagined how vast a treasure they have got among them: so that now they do not much care whether they sell off their merchandise for money in hand, or upon trust.

Utopia
Thomas More

The judicial system treated the Wild West bandits with an unusual degree of understanding. Those who surrendered and survived - Frank James, Cole Younger, Emmett Dalton - served a few years in prison and then went on with their lives; people would not have run around claiming to be Jesse James if this was not true. The West was closing up. The cattle drives ended in the early 1880s. Reconstruction ended in the South. Automobiles and movies and telephones and record players and electric lights and unions washed the continent. The world in which these men had murdered and robbed and plundered no longer existed, and no one felt much need to punish them here and now for the crimes they had committed long ago and not merely far away, but in a place that wasn't anywhere anymore.

Popular Crime
Bill James

Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets. The amygdala can process an auditory signal in fifteen milliseconds - about the amount of time it takes a bullet to go thirty feet. The amygdala is fast but very limited; all it can do is trigger a reflex and wait for the conscious mind to catch up. That reaction is called the startle, and it is composed of protective moves that would be a good idea in almost any situation. When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a "fear grimace": the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down. Make that expression in front of a mirror and see not only how instantly recognizable it is, but also how it seems to actually produce a sense of fear. It's as if the neural pathways flow in both directions, so the expression triggers fear as well as being triggered by it.

WAR by Sebastian Junger

Susan Exbridge was a character, no doubt about it! She amused him with her pretentions and affectations, and he enjoyed teasing her and scolding her occasionally. He could get away with it because of his connections with the K fund.

The Cat Who Went Bananas by Lilian Jackson Braun

" But - it seems so - wrong." Toddy thrust his sharpmuzzle up between the boy's knees, sensing his distress, and John stroked his ears absently, his eyes on Nanette's face with a puzzled frown. Suddenly she felt her own control slipping. She reached behind her for the wall and gripped tightly at the edge of a timber.

The Princeling by Cynthia Harrod - Eagles

The chamber grows silent as liveried trumpeters herald my brother and Josephine's approach. I clutch my reticule so tightly that I can feel my knuckles turning white on the clasp. "Remember to breathe," Paul advises.

It's true. I don't want my brother to see me red-faced when he looks down from the dais. I have prepared fourteen years for this moment, and my complexion is not going to ruin it for me.

Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese in
The Second Empress by, Michelle Moran

"The waves took her breath away. Her bones ached. Her teeth wouldn't stop chattering. A period of time elapsed - she couldn't have said how long - and nothing changed. She clung to the heaving corpse of the Beverly B. because the Beverly B. was the only thing there was. At some point, because they were binding her feet, she ducked her head beaneath the surface to tear off her tennis sneakers and release them into the void. Then she loosed her blue jeans, the cuffs as heavy as lead weights."

From When The Killing's Done - T.C. Boyle

But i simply couldn't rush into a decision that would affect many more lives than mine, even though i realised that if i was mad enough to take on Winter's End i would still have the same money problems i'd always had, only on a much, much grander scale.

From A Winter's Tale by Tricia Ashley

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The Scarlet Letter
Nataniel Hawthorne
p. 43
(p. 42 is left blank in the edition I'm reading from)

Probably Miss Durgan was not altogether taken by surprise. In spite of Mr. Bensington's insistence upon secrecy, rumours of the great chicken Mr. Skinner was producing had been about the village for some weeks. "Lor'!" she cried, "it's what I expected."

The Food of the Gods
H.G. Wells
p. 42

At the confirmation ceremony the bishop would lay his hands on the child and tie around its forehead a linen band which he was required to wear for three days afterwards.

Religion and the decline of magic by Keith Thomas.

(Sorry, but that page only has two paragraphs, and each only partially. So I just took a single sentence.)

Some years passed and he didn't remarry. Perhaps he didn't want to, perhaps there was no suitable opportunity; anyway, he remained a widower. Women gloated over this. He became even stingier than before, and so unkempt that it was positively disgusting. He ate a bit of meat on Saturday: scraps or derma. All week he ate dry food. He baked his own bread of corn and bran. He didn't buy wood. Instead, he went out at night with a sack, to pick up the chips near the bakery. He had two deep pockets and whatever he saw, he put into them: bones, bark, string, shards. He hid all these in his attic. He piled heaps of stuff as high as the roof. "Every little thing comes in handy," he used to say. He was a scholar in the bargain, and could quote Scripture on every occasion, though as a rule he talked little.

"The Wife Killer"
from Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

And here we were, a year later, now married, and she still wasn't saying much. But she was telling me something.

Nightfall by Nelson De Mille

Horton arrived back at Smugwick Manor just after dark, stumbling up the drive in a state of muddiness, stinkiness, itchiness, and emotional confusion.

Horton Halfpott: or, The Fiendish Mystery of Smugwick Manor; or, The Loosening of M'Lady Luggertuck's Corset by Tom Angleberger

Logan was starting to get over his embarrassment by the time they were fighting their way across Anderson Drive, heading back to Force Headquarters. The road had started life as a bypass, but the city had suffered from middle-aged spread and oozed out to fill in the gaps with cold grey granite buildings so that it was more of a belt, stretched across the city and groaning at the seams. It was a nightmare during rush hour.

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

Lord Wolseley had spoken to the orchestra and arranged a small fanfare, and negotiated with the maidservants that at the sound of the music each lady, including his own wife, would venture from her chamber and present herself in the hall for much fussing and admiration. No one was allowed to stay behind. When the fanfare sounded, the gentlemen stood back and the doors were ceremoniously opened. Two dozen ladies descended on the room, all of them wearing elaborate wigs and cakes of makeup and dresses fresh from the greatest paintings of Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney. The gentlemen applauded as the orchestra played the opening of a waltz.

The Master by Colm Tóibín

"That's enough!" said Billy. He'd only been pretending not to listen. Bogie just smiled, shrugged, and said no more.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The second boy balled his fist, cocked the bicep he had been developing for just this moment, and swung a roundhouse uppercut that crashed into his father's skull. That's how he'd imagined it. He'd pumped iron at age fifteen for just this moment. He was rippling with new muscles and confidence, determined his father would never hit him again without consequence. He was relieved when the old man backed down.

The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo

Logan Cates looked out over the desert, feeling the coolness, remembering hot biscuits he had known as a boy, and remembering so much else along with it. A man lost a lot growing up, a lot he could never regain. He shook his head, melancholy, and filled suddenly with a nameless longing.

Last Stand at Papago Wells by Louis L'Amour

Lying hour after hour, getting now and then, like a blow, a terrific crunch on my skull, a spasm of depression, of loneliness, of yearning, of absolute horror. I stand up, open the window, close it. walk up and down, close my eyes, open them, even feel nausea. As though caged, imprisoned in this infernal life. No one is to blame. This makes it even worse. A disease, an affliction . . .

After a Funeral, Diana Athill

#74> Sure that's not Heart of Darkness? :)

#75 If it were I wouldn't be reading it - HATE Heart of Darkness!

#76> That's funny. That's one of my favorite books of all time. And the Athill prose really does remind me of it.

Every so often I swooped down on a grocery store where the day's food sat outside, just delivered, and made off with a load of bananas, or sugar buns, or whatever else took my sleepy-eyed fancy. Once, just for the sheer hell of it, I carted home half a dozen big Chesapeake flounders packed in ice. Roland and I got quite a laugh out of this.

The Bold Saboteurs by Chandler Brossard

Getting up at six o'clock didn't worry Winnie. She was always up by that time at home on the farm and so she didn't moan or groan like most of the other girls in the hut. Nor did she have much difficulty, like some, in stowing her bedding just the way the sergeant had shown them - the three biscuits stacked at the head of the bed, the blankets folded and put on top with one of them wrapped lengthwise round the rest to hold them together, with the join underneath. The bolster topped the pile. Sergeant Beaty had bellowed the instructions the night before, as though they were out on the big parade ground.

Bluebirds by Margaret Mayhew

"The people are just like the architecture," he said, inspecting his appearance in the window's reflection. "They are all front. Everything that's interesting about them seems to be on the surface. Inside they're very different. Now there's a people I could really work with. All Viennese were born to be spies."

A German Requiem by Philip Kerr

Page 42 in my books always seems to have the longest paragraphs. Here's just a few sentences from one -
"After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly dropped, and there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the order came to get the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large sails, we all knew what to expect. In little better than an hour more, the storm was upon us, the thunder was pealing over our heads, and the yacht was running for it." Armadale

And here's a shorter one from Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Classical Music but were Afraid to Ask:
"In the UK classical music charts, Decca's mixture of pure classical and classical crossover stars, combined with its executives' canny knack of knowing exactly how to present each of its artists to the public, has meant that it has consistently been the best-performing label in commercial terms over the past decade."

Maybe she should write to the producers of Nina's reality show. They could send the next group of castaways into the wilderness called "high school". Let's see how long they could survive that jungle.

Locker 572 by, L.T. Kodzo

Numb with grief, Edward nevertheless forced himself to think and act. He sent a slave to meet the waterman and tell him to wait as long as necessary. They would need a larger boat. He found an older slave to put in charge of the plantation. At two o'clock, in a tiny burying ground at the end of the lane between the slave cabins, he presided at the last rites for Big Walter and Sam. A slave funeral in daylight was unusual. Customarily they were held at midnight, so as not to rob the master of an hour's work.

Charleston by John Jakes

The punches kept coming, hard ones. Despite the Rhode Island driver's licence, Caroline had been living in Washington for the last six months, but she'd never tried to make contact with me. She had an English-style basement apartment on C near Seward Square --less than a mile from our house on Fifth Street. I'd jogged by her building dozens of times.

I,Alex Cross by James Patterson

"The old woman looked angrily at him, but retreated as he advanced, and falling back before him suffered him to shut the door upon her and bolt her out among the guests, who were by this time crowding down stairs. Being left alone with his wife, who sat trembling in a corner with her eyes fixed upon the ground, the little man planted himself before her, and folding his arms looked steadily at her for some time without speaking."

The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens

and "He picked up a morning paper. On the back page there was an announcement of a sale that afternoon; a gem of a Georgian House in Hereford. Later on, he might be able to buy a house like that . . . if he accepted. But the thing was a gamble, and he ciould not indulge himself in a gambler's throw, because of Carrie."
(from the short story 'To Love and to Cherish', taken from Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons)

In that these theories are to do with social change, they also entail (a) a historical schema involving (b) a principle of periodization and (c) a characterization of the contemporary situation and its immanent future.
Education and Society by Rob Moore

(immanent is fast becoming my word of the week)

This is the origin of art. Fully established, art is wholly separated from life. It takes from it only what it can use, thus creating itself, as it were, a second time.
The Sociology of Georg Simmel

Inevitably, in these sprawling new metropolitan spaces, with their global networks of commerce, lines were crossed: drinking water became laced with sewage. Ingesting small particles of human waste went from being an anomaly to a staple of everyday life. This was good news for V. colerae.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Once again, I had forgotten about this one.

***

He was preparing to leave when he noticed an oddly dressed man standing a little apart from the main group. His movements, his clothes, everything about him, seemed slightly out of place in this assembly. He spoiled the pattern; like Alvin, he was an anachronism.

The City and the Stars
Arthur C. Clarke

Me too.

"There is something special about disappearing on your hundredth birthday. The local radio station soon followed the loacl newspaper, and then came national radio, the websites of the national newspapers and the afternoon and evening TV news."

The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Two other remarkable ancients were the Countess of Desmond, whose death, at the age of one hundred and forty years, seems to have been less the result of age, or even of the full moon, than the result of climbing an apple tree—a strange occupation for a lady of her rank and years—and falling from this, amidst a shower of glistening apples; and Mr. Henry Jenkins, who died in 1670, at the age of one hundred and sixty-nine.

The English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell

It was a thought to ponder and, Duane soon concluded, he didn't have much to do but ponder it.

Rhino Ranch by Larry McMurtry

Miss Prior darted a doubtful upward glance at the bulk of Harriet towering over her."I wonder if it's going to be big enough on the hips?" she ventured."That's usually where you need it, isn't it?" She took out her familiar tape-measure which was in a little case shaped like a frog. "Lady Boulding on the bust, Miss Harriet on the hips, that's what I always say to myself," she chanted brightly.

Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

"Ned, this is crazy!" I said, banging my fist on my parents' kitchen table, Maisie and Lucas having tactfully withdrawn. " For Christ's sake, write to them. Ask them to come. They can always say no."

A Married Man by Catherine Alliott

Then Mr. Crouchback showed immediate solicitude for Jumbo's comfort. He must not think of sleeping in a bathroom. Mr. Crouchback's sitting-room was at his disposal. Then Mr. Crouchback gave him some excellent sherry and later, at dinner, burgundy and port. He did not mention that this was the last bottle of a little store which he could never hope to replenish.

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh

Large numbers of Americans were blatantly enticed by the Allies. The German-language press commented angrily on recruitment drives in the United States by British and Canadian authorities aware that American manpower was "a blank cheque ready to be filled in." The 97th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was officially known as the "American Legion"; it was officered largely by West Point graduates, its commander a colonel with twelve years' service in the regular American Army.

The Last Days of Innocence; America at War, 1917-1918 by Meirion and Susie Harries

Mr Duncan thought he'd been hit on Christmas Day, but wasn't too clear of the exact date, or time, or how often and for how long he had surfaced to consciousness whilst he had lain, unable to move himself, with the battle raging over his prostrate body. During his conscious periods time had become an eternity of noise, bitter, black, soaking coldness, painfully dazzling brightness, desperate thirst and agonising pain. 'They told me after I was out there but a couple of days and nights, but it was a wee bit confusing. From time to time some chap would heave up my head to pour a drink down my throat and they'd all different voices. English, Jerry, Yank—no saying who was who. When they first scraped me out the mud I'd no idea whose side was taking me in.'

After a Famous Victory by Lucilla Andrews

"Well, I have always been a somewhat persistent sort of fellow," I told her, and she smiled again. It was an oddly bestial smile that reminded me of one of my earlier impressions of her - that oppressive summer's day, now more than two months past, studying a handful of old clippings in the Hope Street boarding house. That her human face was nothing more than a mask or fairy glamour conjured to hide the truth of her from the world.

From the short story "Pickman's Other Model (1929)" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Collected in Black Wings of Cthulhu: Twenty-One Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, edited by S.T. Joshi

>96 MerryMary: & 97
Drat! Adding two more books to my wishlist!

Over the next few hours the Sheriff's Office dispatched a large number of heavily-armed deputies to the area where Melo had fallen. The suspect was armed and assumed to be possibly still in the heavily-forested area near the site where he'd shot Melo. As a result, the responding officers were forced to move into the vicinity with the greatest caution. With the law enforcement officers and SWAT team members slowly searching the surrounding area, the passengers on the halted Skunk Train were kept on lockdown for several hours before being taken by bus to fort Bragg.

Out There in the Woods by Stephen Sparks and Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman

Gegoloshweli afterwards told me that one of the police agentson duty at the station had reported that two people sitting on the platform were talking in a foreign language. These were Mrs Stephanovitch and myself. Rakmelevitch had at once ordered our arrest.

Mission to Tashkent by F M Bailey

"A violence of mind and weather swirled around the walls of Magdalen (College at Oxford). Men were on edge, their spirits either restless or defensive, for there came to be an awareness, in spite of walls, of what lay beyond the narrow Thames and even beyond the Channel and the North Seas. The whispers of distant lands came symbolically in a new language. Frowned upon as pagan and of devilish consequence, Greek had suffered for years exclusion from doughty England, where Latin held court and enjoyed obeisance in every school. Then came a man bearing the gift of Greek, William Grocyn by name and a native of Wiltshire, who had traveled in Italy and fallen there to the charms of an ancient literature encased in another language. Thus Greek made its way, smuggled in under the guise of respectability, to Magdalen, bringing with it scents of spices from other climes, as a summer wind carries memories and is laden with traces of treasure from some indefinable country far away."

Naked to Mine Enemies: The Life of Cardinal Wolsey by Charles W. Ferguson

>102 rocketjk:
Wow! Nice!

#103> I know! You pick up, basically at random and on a whim, a biography of a 16th Century English Cardinal (a very, very important one, but still), written in 1958, you're not exactly expecting writing like that. I'm still only on page 55 or so out of a 500-page book. I'm enjoying it more than I dreamed I might when I picked it up in a thrift store a month or so back.

In case you're interested, here is Ferguson's brief obituary from the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/20/obituaries/charles-w-ferguson-ex-magazine-edit...

Thanks. I wouldn't have associated that erudition with Readers' Digest.

"I told him you were very upset, which is certainly natural, under the circumstances,Jessica, lets sit down." She didn't like the way he said it, but maybe he was just tired. They'd all had a long day. An endless day.

Now and Forever by Danielle Steel

In South Fork there were scores of people who had been out on the dam and had seen the view. There were others who knew even more about the club and the goings on there because they worked on the grounds, tending lawns or waiting on tables at the clubhouse. But for everyone else the place was largely a mystery. It was all private property, and as the club managers had made quite clear on more than one occasion, uninvited guests were definitely not welcome.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

He sat down on a two-seater sofa and patted the space beside him, but Toni drew up a hard chair and sat opposite. Toni had been out on only two dates with him since the murder. On each occasion, he had lectured her on the dangers of her job when he was not pontificating about the importance of his own. Toni wondered what she had ever seen in him. Maybe a psychiatrist would say she had been looking for a substitute father.

Agatha Raisin - As the Pig Turns by M.C.Beaton

MIA: "Fox Force Five." Fox, as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks. Force, as in we're a force to be reckoned with. Five, as in there's one..two..three..four..five of us. There was a blonde one, Sommerset O'Neal from the show "Baton Rouge," she was the leader. A Japanese one, a black one, a French one and a brunette one, me. We all had special skills. Somerset had a photographic memory, the Japanese fox was a kung fu master, the black girl was a demolition expert, the French fox' specialty was sex....

Pulp Fiction (Screenplay)
Quentin Tarantino

Sorrow has a nature of its own, and of course it always does change things. In the case of Bonaventure Arrow, Sorrow moved in with his family and enjoyed the status of uninvited guest.

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by, Rita Leganski

Susie Lovecraft and her adolescent son moved to a house three blocks east of the Phillips mansion: Number 598-600 Angell Street. They rented the ground floor, which bore the number 598. Although the new quarters had five rooms, besides the use of attic and basement, the move gave young Lovecraft a staggering shock: For the first time I knew what a congested, servantless house - with another family in the same house - was. There was a vacant lot next door... which I promptly exploited as a landscape garden and adorned with a village of piano-box houses, but even that failed to assuage my nostalgia. I felt that I had lost my entire adjustment to the cosmos - for indeed what was HPL without the remembered rooms & hallways & hangings & staircases & statuary & paintings... & yards & walks & cherry-trees & fountain & ivy-grown arch & stable & gardens & all the rest? How could an old man of 14 (& I surely felt that way!) readjust his existence to a skimpy flat & new household programme & inferior outdoor setting in which almost nothing familiar remained? It seemed like a damned futile business to keep on living... My home had been my ideal of Paradise & my source of inspiration - but it was to be profaned by other hands. Life from that day has held for me but one ambition - to regain the old place & reestablish its glory - a thing I fear I can never accomplish.

Lovecraft: A Biography
L. Sprague de Camp

And I am there also. "Albino Olympia," viewed from the side to display my hump, bald nobbly head tilted charmingly, curtsying with one arm pointing at the glorious Chick and his miraculous burden. Chick was six and I was twelve but he loomed a full head taller. The arched banner across the top of joyous glitter, "The Fabulous Binewskis."

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

But for her, empty vessel, the fate was something else entirely. The God of Love had allowed her the time of wandering, trapped by day in stones, freed at night to wander. He had allowed her the final chance. And having failed to take it, her fate was with these other claiming creatures, gods themselves... of another order... higher or lower I had no idea. But terrible.

From the short story "On the Downhill Side"
Collected in Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison

Granuaile had a slightly wild yet glazed look to her eyes, the look that graduates and brides get when they are congratulated by an endless train of well-wishers. Having your hand kissed by gods and your cheeks kissed by godesses can set one's heart aflutter, but I think she bore it well. She didn't go all fangirl on anyone, but I suspect that's only because none of them bore the slightest resemblance to Nathan Fillion.

Trapped by Kevin Hearne

That's how they came to start, jogging off from the inn one fine morning just before May, on laden ponies; and Bilbo was wearing a dark-green hood (a little weather-stained) and a dark-green cloak borrowed from Dwalin. They were too large for him, and he looked rather comical. What his father Bungo would have thought of him, I daren't think. His only comfort was he couldn't be mistaken for a dwarf, as he had no beard.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

"It is our fervent hope that each of you will find a path out of the depravity of your early lives, and with firm guidance and hard work transform into respectable citizens who can pull your weight in society. Now, I am not so naive as to believe that this will be the case for all."

The Orphan Train by, Christina Baker Kline

Now, I've had to read Hamlet for like every English class I've taken since high school, and I know my motherfucking (or motherwantingto - if you subscribe to that interpretation) Hamlet. And so I head over there, and there's a weird feeling in me as I do it. After a few steps I realize, well, by golly, this just might be what it's like to feel qualified.
"Hey," I say, "you guys need any help?"
"We need some flowers for a school project," one of the girls says.
"Hamlet?" I ask nonchalantly.
"Yeah," the girl replies. "We have to make a movie of act four, scene five for our English class.
"That's cool."
"Not really," one of the guys says. "It's due sixth period."
Ah. Ergo the video camera.

Know Not Why: A Novel by Hannah Johnson

She shrugged. "He didn't say. They don't, you know. Just, how many are living here? Do you have milk cards for the children? Where did you work in the war? It's worse than the Nazis. Maybe he was counting the dead. They do that, so you can't use the name for the ration cards."

The Good German by Joseph Kanon

Moon Mockery

I walked in Tara's Wood one summer night,
And saw, amid the still, star-haunted skies,
A slender moon in silver mist arise,
And hover on the hill as if in fright.
Burning, I seized her veil and held her tight:
An instant all her glow was in my eyes;
Then she was gone, swift as a white bird flies,
And I went down the hill in opal light.

And soon I was aware, as down I came,
That all was strange and new on every side;
Strange people went about me to and fro,
And when I spoke with trembling mine own name
They turned away, but one man said: “He died
In Tara Wood, a hundred years ago.”

Poem collected in the arguably-not-entirely-accurately-named The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard by Robert E. Howard

#119> Love that. Thanks for posting.

>120 rocketjk:

My pleasure. In spite of being primarily known today for his fiction, Howard was also a prolific poet. If you enjoyed that, you'll be happy to know that a great deal of his poetry is freely available online (for example, at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Robert_Ervin_Howard/Poetry). My favorite is a piece of his called "Recompense":

http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/Recompense_(Howard)

"There seems no technical reason why spacecraft cannot reach ninety per cent, or more, of the speed of light. That would mean a travel time of five to ten years between neighboring stars - tedious, perhaps, but not impracticable, especially for creatures whose life spans might be measured in centuries. One can imagine voyages of this duration carried out in ships not much larger than ours.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

(The quotation mark at the beginning is not a typo - the paragraph is taken from a character in the middle of a longish speech)

Archy picked up Rolando, snoozing in his caddy, and made a formal transfer of custody to the grandfather, England turning over Hong Kong, mournful trumpets of farewell, a weird ache in Archy's heart like the forerunner or possibly the distant memory of tears. The men slipped from their stools and trooped out.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

"Graves looked at him a little suspiciously but fell into step as Jack cheerfully strode on. The watchmakers shops would be found all too close to Fleet Street, but with his ill-gotten gains safely out of his hands and dressed in completely different clothing, Jack had only to be a single street away to be effectively invisible. It was one of the foibles of human nature that he had learned as a child of the streets. People saw what they expected to see. To the great English public he was a non-descript gentleman of a conservative bent, not the more flamboyant pretender who had robbed a local shop. The haberdasher himself might remember Jack’s face, but his general description would be meaningless to the other shopkeepers as well as to the police... for the moment."

Jack Dawkins by Charlton Daines

Sometimes the fierce Santa Anna wind blows offshore, and then let the little shipping look out. This wind chops up a good nature as well as the surface of the sea. The Santa Anna is not conducive to kindliness. In Spain, they have a hot wind called the Solano. They have a proverb which says, "Ask no favors during Solano."

Happy Days in Southern California (1898) by Frederick Hastings Rindge

"The Romans dominated the world for hundreds of years. Does anyone care to guess why?" he asked as we sat in front of him on the gymnasium floor.
I almost raised my hand. Legions, right? Military strategy and organization? I didn't remember a ton from tenth-grade history, but I knew a few things still.
"Leg strength," he said. "No one had thighs like the Romans."

Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg

The black Chevrolet was again parked, this time in front of a Catholic hospital on the outskirts of Emporia. Under continued needling ("That's your trouble. You think there's only one right way - Dick's way"), Dick had surrendered. While Perry waited in the car, he had gone into the hospital to try and buy a pair of black stockings from a nun. This rather unorthodox method of obtaining them had been Perry's inspiration; nuns, he had argued, were certain to have a supply. The notion presented one drawback, of course: nuns, and anything pertaining to them, were bad luck, and Perry was most respectful of his superstitions. (Some others were the number 15, red hair, white flowers, priests crossing a road, snakes appearing in a dream.) Still, it couldn't be helped. The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry. He was here, and embarked on the present errand, not because he wished to be but because fate had arranged the matter; he could prove it - though he had no intention of doing so, at least within Dick's hearing, for the proof would involve his confessing the true and secret motive behind his return to Kansas, a piece of parole violation he had decided upon for a reason quite unrelated to Dick's "score" or Dick's summoning letter. The reason was that several weeks earlier he had learned that on Thursday, November 12, another of his former cellmates was being released from Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, and "more than anything in the world," he desired a reunion with this man, his "real and only friend," the "brilliant" Willie-Jay.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Terri met his eyes, letting a quizzical smile play across her mouth. She could only hope that Keene would get the message: her husband was an actor, and she was too polite to say so. Richie turned back to the mediator, eyes narrowing in pretended hurt. How terrible, Terri thought, to play games for the future of a child.

Eyes of a Child by William North Patterson

One would not believe today that the best musicians and even friends of mine, who had some esteem for my musicianship, misjudged my music very badly. But I must admit than in 1905 the music sounded confusing to the ears of my contemporaries and that the score also offered enigmas. So when I showed the First String Quartet to Gustav Mahler, the great Austrian composer and conductor, at the time the head of the Imperial Opera in Vienna, he said: 'I have conducted the most difficult scores of Wagner; I have written complicated music myself in scores of up to thirty staves and more; yet here is a score of not more than four staves, and I am unable to read them.' It is true the score looked, if possible, even more complicated to the eyes than it sounded to the ears, especially passages such as the following:

Style and Idea by Arnold Schönberg, in an essay from 1937 titled "How one becomes lonely".

Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture - long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or "Movies of the Week". He had created a cocoon of human activities - conversation, interaction, affection - and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Thuong took over the interrogation reluctantly. It was, he thought, the part of the operation he disliked the most and as such it mirrored the change in his career. When he had first begun, as a young aspirant, he had liked this the best, and, he felt, perhaps because his parents were poorer than the parents of the other officers, that he did it better than the others, that he was able to play the role of the good officer. But each year it had gotten a little worse; the distaste had begun two years before when they had moved through a village they knew to be Vietcong and had found nothing; they were about to leave when a little boy, perhaps three years old, looked at him and began to weep and then ran to a tree by the canal and pulled out his father, a young Vietcong officer, a husky healthy young man. The father had never looked at Thuong, never said anything to him, simply walked to the child and began to pat him, to quiet him and keep him from crying; then finally when the child was silent, he had turned to Thuong and said "Now which way do you want me to walk, north or south? Let's get on with it." After that, the war had gotten steadily a little older and uglier; they had, both sides, taken a higher price of these people, and the people had withdrawn into themselves, until it was more and more of a charade, more and more futile, more and more words on their part, fewer words on the part of the people, until finally it was the part of the war he liked the least. He sensed the political officers for the Vietcong must be experiencing the same thing, but they, he was sure, would have some phrase, some idea, some revolutionary rationale with which to continue, some fortuitous quotation from Ho which they memorized, and worse, believed. They would be told that it was for the people's own good even if the people did not understand it, until perhaps in exhaustion and desperation the people would come to believe it too. Perhaps in desperation, the people told them yes, we promise to believe if you will promise not to come back here.

One Very Hot Day by David Halberstam

It didn't matter which way they went, or how many people saw them go. Parker knew that but he didn't say anything about it. This Alma was a busher, a new fish, and she didn't know how this kind of operation was handled. Parker knew this, because this was his line of work, but he didn't say anything about it. All he said was, "Tractor-trailors don't outrun police cars. We leave them at the diner."

-- The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake)

Nish. We took a tumble-down cab--whose bottom-board immediately fell out--attached to two dying horses and driven by a bandit in a high fur cap, and jolted up a wide street paved with mud and wide-set sharp cobbles. Round about the city the green hills rose, beautiful with new leaves and with every flowering fruit-tree, and over the wide-flung Turkish roofs, and the few mean plaster building in the European style, loomed the bulbous Greek domes of the cathedral. Here and there was the slender spire of a minaret, crisscrossed with telephone-wires. The street opened into a vast square, a sea of mud and cobbles bounded by wretched huts, across which marched steel poles carrying hundreds of wires and huge modern arc-lights. At one side an ox lay on his back, feet clewed up to a wooden beam, while peasants shod him with solid iron plates, as they had done it for half a thousand years.

The War in Eastern Europe by John Reed

I read from my Kindle app on my Nook HD+ so I have no idea where page 42 is. But I did find this paragraph on the 42nd screen swipe.

Indeed, the Army appeared to have no idea how to proceed, as they remained in place and accepted being decimated. The only move the snowmen made was to slide forward and replace any snowman destroyed in the next row. But the North Pole would not continue to go unchallenged much longer. - The South Pole Challenge by Kevin George

" . . . the 42nd screen swipe."

Close enough!

Yay! :o)

From the 42nd screen swipe of The Third Pig Detective Agency by Bob Burke:

He trudged down the alleyway to the street and I tried to clean up my clothes. Apart from used magic beans there were a number of wet newspapers, a variety of vegetables, an old bedspring and spaghetti on varioius parts of my person. I wasn't sure if I was removing them or smearing them in. When I was finished I certainly didn't smell any better and my suit would never be worn again thanks to the many nonremovable stains it now sported. Moving very carefully and very painfully I made my way back towards the street, one aching step at a time.

And from Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Church by Adam S. McHugh:

It is important to differentiate between energy source and energy level. People sometimes think of introverts as listless or despondent, the Eeyores of the social scene. But it's not that we have less energy, it's that we lose it through interaction. We start to flag after an extended period without solitude. Depending on other personality and biological factors, we may charge to a high level, but we have a shorter battery life than extroverts. Further, many of us have learned to move and talk a little slower in order to preserve our social energy. Extroverts, likewise, can start with varying degrees of energy, even less than some introverts, but they will gain power from the outside world and leave with more than they came in with.

Screen swipe 42 from The Maze of the Beast by Emily Rodda:

They had lost track of time. They did not know whether it was day or night. But it was in fact exactly seventy-two hours and five minutes after they first entered the cavern that they heard a hiss from the window in the door.

Again, to his gaze, the enormous whirling world into which he had peered was a small and cloudy crystal on his rune-wrought table in Mhu Thulan. Then, by degrees, it seemed that the great room with sculptured panels of mammoth ivory was narrowing to another and dinger place; and Zon Mezzamalech, losing his preternatural wisdom and sorcerous power, went back by a weird regression into Paul Tregardis.

From the short story "Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
Collected in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (James Turner, ed.)
Note: the entire story can be read online here:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/224/ubbo-sathla

Screen swipe 42 from The Valley of the Lost by Emily Rodda:

With Leif and Barda supporting Dain between them, the companions began to make their way out of the city. Dain's eyes were dark and blank. His feet stumbled and dragged. Cold sweat beaded his brow. The terrrible shuddering still racked his slight body.

"You can be facetious, I see," the latter observed, carelessly. "That's all right. It may enliven your oratory at socialist congresses. But this room is no place for it. It would be infinitely safer for you to follow carefully what I am saying. As you are being called upon to furnish facts instead of cock-and-bull stories, you had better try to make your profit off what I am taking the trouble to explain to you. The sacrosanct fetish of today is science. Why don't you get some of your friends to go for that wooden-faced panjandrum--eh? It it not part of these institutions that must be swept away before the F. P.* comes along?"

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

* Future of the Proletariat

From the 42nd screen swipe of The Ho Ho Ho Mystery by Bob Burke:

I was just thanking my lucky stars, lucky rabbit's foot, lucky anything-else-lucky-I-had-in-my-possession when the big, ugly, hob-nailed boot of fate stamped down on me one more time. The sleigh skewed wildly as our attackers hit it once again. There was a scream and I saw a blur of red as something large fell past me. There was an almighty tug on my legs as if someone had attached something heavy - like, say, a truck - to them.

April 21, 2003: The Chicago Tribune reports that the most visible cultural influence in Afghanistan was Titanic, with Celine in tow. Most residents had seen the movie on illegal video when the Taliban regime was still in place, but now: "In {Kabul's} central market, vendors now sell Titanic Mosquito Killer, Havoc on the Titanic Perfume Body Spray, Titanic Making Love Ecstasy Perfume Body Spray... Whatever is big is Titanic. Large cucumbers and potatoes are sold as Titanic vegetables. Popular thick-soled shoes are called Titanic shoes." And Celine tapes played from boomboxes in many stalls.

Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

The 42nd screen swipe of Absolution by Murder consisted entirely of dialogue which would have made little sense so I decided to back up a bit. This exchange is from the 40th screen swipe of the ebook:

"What is it child?" inquired the abbess.

The young woman's chin came up a trifle pugnaciously and she introduced herself in Irish.

"I have just arrived at the abbey, Mother Abbess, and have been asked to report my presence to you and the Bishop Colman. My name is Fidelma of Kildare."

Before Abbess Hida had time to respond, questioning why a young Irish religieuse should be worthy to be asked to make her presence known to them, the Bishop Colman had risen from his chair and had taken a stride towards the girl with an outstretched hand of welcome. Hilda stared at him, her mouth opening slightly in her astonishment. It was curiously unlike the haughty misogynism of Colman to rise up to greet a young sister of the order.

Reading a physical book this time! From page 42 of Cavern of the Fear:

"You have no reason to trust me," the man said, as if reading her mind. "I do not ask you to do so. Walk behind me with your dagger in my back, if you wish."

Jasmine made her decision. She nodded briskly. "Lead on, then," she said. "But I warn you. One false move and I will not hesitate to kill you. And whatever the treasure is, it had better be worth my while!"

From p. 42 of The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

I get particularly hooked by the listing of wedding-presents at society marriages, telling myself that this is all good research on cultures of gift-giving, and waste an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out who is being over-generous, who a cheap-skate and who is just dull. My great-great-grandmother gives a set of golden serving dishes shaped as cockle shells at a society wedding in 1874. Vulgar, I think, with nothing to back this up.

Chemy grinned, shrugging his shoulders. "I don't know yet. I figure maybe. The car's hot in Florida, and the plates are hot in Alabama, but the plates are off a LaSalle, so you got nothing to worry about."

The Outfit by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake)

And a merciless rain it soon became, pouring in thick frothy streams from water-spouts and ledges, tumbling in vertical sheets from roofs and spires and parapets high above the teeming city, turning streets and thoroughfares into evil-smelling streams of filth and liquid refuse. I found my old companion, Willoughby Le Grice, lounging, as I knew he would be at this hour, at the Ship and Turtle in Leadenhall-street.

The Meaning of Night: a Confession by Michael Cox

From page 42 of Dragon's Nest by Emily Rodda:

"The man they called enemy and upstart knew the answer, for he drew a map to show where the Sisters were," said Lief. "If only we could find out who he was! Our one clue is that he lived in the time of a chief advisor called Drumm. Josef can surely tell us when that was."

"The man himself is not important, Lief!" exclaimed Jasmine. "The important thing is his map! Drumm had part of it, hidden in a safe place. It may still exist."

"After hundreds of years?" jeered Doom.

"Why not?" Jasmine flashed back. "The palace is full of things that have been there for hundreds of years. That is one of the reasons it seems to me a tomb! And surely the palace is where Drumm would have hidden something valuable. He lived there."

From screenswipe 42 of Shroud for the Archbishop by Peter Tremayne:

Since arriving in Rome seven days ago Fidelma had hardly seen Eadulf. She had heard that Wighard and his main entourage had already arrived a few day's previously in the city and had been invited to lodge at the Lateran Palace as personal guests of the Holy Father, Vitalian. Fidelma suspected that the Bishop of Rome had been overjoyed at the news of Canterbury's success over the Irish faction at Streoneshalh.

Having parted with Eadulf on arriving in Rome, Fidelma had been recommended to a small hostel in a side street off the Via Merulana next to the oratory erected by Pius I to the Blessed Prassede. The community in the hostel was transitory for it considted mainly of pilgrims whose periods of stay in the city varied. The household was run by a Gaulish priest, a deacon of the church, Arsenius, and his wife, the deaconess, Epiphania. They were an elderly couple without children but were as a father and mother to the foreign visitors, mainly Irish peregrinatio pro Christo, who sought lodging with them.

For over a week now all Fidelma had seen of the great city of Rome was the modest house of Arsenius and Epiphania and the magnificence of the Lateran Palace with the varying poverty of the streets that separated them.

From page 42 of Shadowgate by Emily Rodda:

Barda put on the striped mask and was instantly transformed int a glaring stranger.

He threw the bird mask to Lief. "This is yours, I suspect, young Lewin, since are to be Bess's songbird," he said.

Reluctantly, Lief pulled the blue-feathered mask over his head. To his surpirse, he could hear, see, and breathe far better than he had expected.

All the same, he felt uneasy. He touched his feathered face and a chill ran down his spine.

From the 42nd screen swipe of Behold a Pale Horse by Peter Tremayne:

"Black cloaks and hoods?" Fidelma commented again in a low voice. "Do you not think that the same men who attacked you Genua are the same who tried to kill you just now?"

Magister Ado was defensive. "That does not necessarily follow. Lots of people wear black cloaks with hoods."

"Not many during the heat of summer," Fidelma replied dryly, glancing up at the cloudless blue sky.

In retrospect, it may seem a deeply perverse joke that David Gates, later the vastly successful leader of the MOR soft-rock group Bread ("Baby, I'm a Want You"), would have anything to do with a group as idiosyncratic as Beefheart's. But, at that time, Gates was something of a adventurous producer, one eagerly seeking out distinct talent. He was also a great R&B fan with good taste. His favorite song just happened to be Bo Diddley's mid-50s hit "Diddy Wah Diddy," and he was dead right in figuring that it was a perfect tune for Beefheart to sing. He didn't have much choice, in any case, since the band didn't have much in the way of original material to record.

Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

#152> Whoa! A book about Captain Beefheart! I saw him perform with Zappa once in Boston. Always loved his stuff. Hope that book is good.

>153 rocketjk:

No shit! Jealous; that must have been amazing. 8)

Yeah, the book was quite good actually - emphasized the importance of the roles Zappa and the (aptly-named) Magic Band in the development of his music a lot more than most of the other writing I've read on Beefheart (e.g., Lester Bangs' and Langdon Winner's). A real quick read, too - I finished it in about three days, which is unheard of for me lately. :)

They came out, shambling and puzzled. They realized that something was very wrong. There was the Duchess on the ground and she wasn't telling them what to do the way she'd been telling them for weeks now. They wanted to oblige her in any little way they could, like shooting strangers, or scrounging canned food for her, but how could they oblige her while she lay there slowly turning purple? It was very confusing. Luckily, there was somebody else to oblige, the professor.

-- "The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth from the collection The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, edited by Judith Merrill

"We are informed that you spent many hours by his bedside, lifting him bodily upon your shoulders while his bedding was changed, conversing with him in his delirium."

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

"Okay... This looks bad. Really... ...really bad. But believe it or not... it's only the third most-terrible idea I've had today and today I have had exactly nine terrible ideas."

Hawkeye My Life As A Weapon by Matt Fraction

But never has Eo been more beautiful to me than in that moment. In the face of cold power, she is fire. This is the girl who danced through the smoky tav with a mane of red. This is the girl who wove me a wedding band of her own hair. This is the girl who chooses to die for a song of death.



Red Rising - Pierce Brown

"I found out in the newspaper that the trouble in my country started with a leftist uprising. Look, Larry, you don't know it, but you could be getting involved in something messy. Let's get out of this aisle. I don't want to be next to your favorite books."

-- Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages by Manuel Puig

Fight Club, Palahniuk's first novel, is boundary-breaking, bleak, and zeitgeist-y, and was canonized as a cult classic way before the 1998 movie. Lovers of style over substance may not go in for his conversational tone (in a Guardian interview, Palahniuk admitted he doesn't go in for "all those abstract, chicken-shit descriptions"), but it matters not. His message comes across loud and clear without such detail, namely: "Your life comes down to nothing and not even nothing, oblivion."

500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide by Gina McKinnon

"I wanted that telescope. Dan Rymer's telescope had been all around the world twice and he had given it to Tim. Dan Rymer had first seen the great Patagonian condor soaring high above the blue sierras through that telescope, Tim said. Once, once only, I had been allowed to look through it, and only for a few seconds. I saw the world anew. I saw the querulous shadow in the eye of a starling."

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

You ask, and they will tell you they never thought it would happen, the good people of Oak Forest who have remained since that day in March 1966. Who ever does? Who calls fate to themselves on a dare? Who but a fool tempts it, in the old way of saying, by putting their mouths on it? Who conjures up thoughts grim enough to keep the hopeful sleepless? And who but those in the habit of dark prophecy would point a finger to the future of disaster, at the blown-out, heaving patch of dirt and concrete South Jackson would become?

A World Turned Over by Lorian Hemingway

Randolph hastened north to give Harriman the dismal news that his money had been sunk in one of the world's largest ratholes. The valley risked being inundated by an ungovernable river, menacing millions of dollars in crops and the livelihood of thousands. The breach could be closed, but it would take much more than the $200,000 already loaned to Rockwood. Randolph informed Harriman that the final tally might well approach $1 million.

Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael Hiltzik

I returned to the town; and once again I sought to make my presence known to the inhabitants, but all in vain. And after awhile, as I trudged from street to street, the sun went down behind the island, and the stars came swiftly out in a heaven of purpureal velvet. The stars were large and lustrous and were innumerably thick: with the eye of a practiced mariner, I studied them eagerly; but I could not trace the wonted constellations, though here and there I thought that I perceived a distortion of elongation of some familiar grouping. All was hopelessly askew, and disorder crept into my very brain, as I tried once more to orient myself, and noticed that the inhabitants of the town were still busied with a similar endeavor...

From the short story "The Uncharted Isle" by Clark Ashton Smith
Collected in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (S.T. Joshi, ed.)
The entire story can be read online here:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/226/the-uncharted-isle

'Woo-hoo! And out of the darkness came' - Sophie twiddled her fingers and winged her hand towards her like a bird - 'the steak and mushroom pasty.'

It Happened One Summer by Polly Williams

"And she was ashamed to remember her original mistake. It was far better to forget the bad beginning."

After the Fire by Belva Plain

"Go on." I waved grimly at the waiter. I wasn't sure I could stay there much longer. I wanted to tell Winterton how really pleased I was that the British had burnt the White House to the ground.

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

At last he cleared his throat. "God will surely bless you all for the courage and strength you have shown. You have fought bravely for our beloved country. Your grandchildren will bless you for it." Here he paused, and cleared his throat again. "But the Polish army is through. I have just learned that the Germans and the Soviets have divided Poland between them. Even now, we are standing in Soviet territory. We are not a country any longer. There is no more Poland."

In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke

'While she was shopping all thoughts of her new job had been pushed to the back of her mind, but, once she was home she began to regret her promise. She had accepted a position without knowing all the facts. She didn't know if she would like the house,her tasks, or her employer. How could she have been so stupid?'

from "Never Run Away" by Julie C. Round.

Nicholas obeyed. The news was nearly over: we had, luckily, missed the conferences, the strikes, the newest atomic developments, the latest rumours from the U.S.S.R., and had come in just in time for a fuss about the seating in Westminster Abbey, a description of the arches in the Mall, and a hint of the general excitement in a London seething already towrds its Coronation boiling-point three days hence. And nothing yet, apparently, about Everest...

Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart

It was a huge black panther, leaping through the air like Black Susan leaping on a mouse. It was many, many times bigger than Black Susan. It as so big that if it leaped on Grandpa it could kill him with its enormous, slashing claws and its long sharp teeth.

Little House in the Big Woods Laura Ingalls Wilder

Frank accepted the honor by thanking not the city but the road. "It isn't every day that you get a street changing its name for you," he pointed out matter-of-factly. The universe was suddenly crazy with compliments for him. Only a year earlier, he was being booed in his home park. Now a recent letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun had chided the city's citizens for not allowing Robby, "the man who made the difference this year," to purchase a home wherever he wanted. "Until Baltimore is ready to greet the Frank Robinsons and the Paul Blairs as neighbors, rather than only as glorified gladiators," the letter concluded, "such honors as these athletes help bring to our city will continue to have a hollow ring."

-- Black and Blue: the Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys, and the 1966 World Series that Stunned America by Tom Adelman

My heart beat faster. Acheron might not stay long and I was in a position for advancement beyond the LiteraTecs for good. Capturing Hades would be something no one could ever ignore.

The Eyre Affair
Jasper Fforde

He walked faster, resisting the impulse to start running. Better to keep his head up. Pretend all was well. Trust that he would make it through to the other side where there were witnesses before they had the chance to strike.

Sepulchre by Kate Mosse

"NOO!" Arkos roared. "Haven't you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then I'd HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly, in fact, and lets the others read in the meanings. I haven't talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story."

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Although there were still one or two who grumbled and made dire predictions about the presence of women aboard a whaler, we were for the most part treated with real consideration. In fact, Phoebe Preble and I were soon on such friendly terms with various members of the crew that her mother complained there would be no living with the child when we got home again. I, too, felt a distinct sense of my own importance when 'Lige and his special crony, one Reuben Somes, said that they had no doubt I would bring them good luck on this voyage. They decided this after Phoebe had told them the story of my being made of mountain-ash wood.

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field.
Style of writing for children was a bit different in 1929!

>176 nrmay: You've motivated me to get my copy out and re-enjoy it. I've always had a special place in my heart for Hitty.

I do my reading on a tablet so from screen 42 of O Jerusalem by Laurie R. King:

"Holmes," I said, addressing my mentor, my senior partner in crime, a man nearly old enough to be my grandfather, a person revered by half the world, "Holmes, don't be difficult. They're right, and you're wasting time. I didn't argue last night when I was sent away with the rest of the household goods, because it was the sensible thing to do. Now the sensible thing would be to let them get on with it. Painful as it is to admit, I can't be left alone here during the day - my Arabic wouldn't stand up to a visitor. Yours would."

**************************

And from the book I'm reading with my kids, screen 42 of The Bravest Princess by E.D. Baker:

After the guards hoisted the old woman up to the window, Liam supervised the dismantling of the pulley and helped the men load the basket and rope into the carriage. Annie untied her mare while Liam and the guards combed the area for anything that could be used to reach the tower window. Although the crows were gone, Annie couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her and was relieved when they started for Casaway, the home of the royal family in Dorinocco.

'No kidding,' I said, sitting down and cradling my herbs. Belladonna extended a thoughtful paw and combed her claws through my hair. She didn't touch my scalp but it made me shiver. Or something did.

Devil's Food by Kerry Greenwood. I like her style and quirky sense of humor! I'll look for another one of her books.

I was sweating as freely as the duke was by the time the spasm eased enough for him to breathe without the positive-pressure exercise. I wasn't quite as tired as he was - he lay back in the chair, exhausted, eyes closed, drawing slow, shallow - but free! - breaths - but close. I felt light-headed, too; it's not possible to help someone breathe without doing a lot of it yourself, and I was hyperventilated.

Written in My Own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon.
I love reading about Claire's healing skills throughout this series. She's always modifying and adapting her considerable knowledge of contemporary medicine to conditions and what's available in the 1700s.

from screen 42 of the Kindle version of Justice Hall by Laurie R. King:

I expected Alistair to dismiss the servant's concern with a curt phrase - as Ali, he certainly would have - but he surprised me. "It's nothing, Algy. I got bashed in Town yesterday and I've gone all stiff on the train. I'll be fine after a night's sleep."

***************************************

from page 42 of the paperback version of The Alchemyst by Michael Scott:

"No, not all of it." Flamel smiled. He walked on, with the twins still on either side of him. "When Dee was my apprentice in Paris, he found out about the Codex. One day I caught him attempting to steal it, and I knew then that he had allied himself with the Dark Elders. I refused to share its secrets with him and we had a bitter argument. That night he sent the first assassins after Perry and me. They were human and we dealt with them easily. The next night, the assassins were decidedly less than human. So Perry and I took the Book, gathered up our few belongings and fled Paris. He's been chasing us ever since."

This was not a child; it was an unnaturally compressed adult. One sees them sometimes in Flemish paintings; tiny burgermaster's daughters, their heads caught in vice-like ruffs; their small plain faces unutterly grave. Velasquez painted them at the Spanish court; knee-high infantas, imprisoned in silk.

Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson. Historical fiction - Vienna just prior to WWI

"I'm not a child anymore." I say, firm. I should be stepping away at once, but I'd forgotten how beautiful this lady is, in the way that nightshade is beautiful. I can't bring myself to turn away.

A Creature of Moonlight by Rebecca Hahn. YA fantasy where the woods are alive and young girls disappear within the moving, murmuring trees.

Dylan gripped the handlebars. Abraham had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. "Only if you stay on the block," Dylan said, miserably.

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

It was not until tea-time that Holmes broke off the lessons, when my tongue and my fingers were both about to stutter to a halt. We went up to the salon for tea, and the genial drink coupled with the fresh Mediterranean air soothed me as if I'd been granted an afternoon nap. Afterwards, we bundled up and strolled the decks, where at last Holmes began the story of his meeting with the young Kim O'Hara - in Hindi alternating with English translations, a broken narrative rendered yet more difficult to follow by the necessity of switching to something innocuous whenever another set of ears came near. It was a method of discourse with which, by that time, I had some familiarity: I had known the man at my side for just under nine years, been his partner for five, his wife for three.

from the 42nd screen of Kindle version of The Game by Laurie R. King

All over New York, Kurtzberg scurried, trying to find someone to buy his artwork and ideas. He heard that Bob Kahn, an artist he'd met at Eisner-Iger, had sold Harry Donenfeld's company a new strip called Batman. So Jack tried over there, only to get the same answer he heard so often: "Sorry, we have all the material we need." Finally, at the suggestion of some other artists, Jack did what they all did sooner or later, usually sooner. He went over and enlisted in the sweatshop of Victor Fox, King of the Comics.

Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier

Lady laughed at Hugo Hadley. Nobody laughed at Hugo Hadley. Not his wife, certainly. Not his law partners. Not Fin. No one laughed at Hugo but Lady.

Fin & Lady by Cathleen Schine

This is an unexpectedly fetching thread.

footnote 7 The darkened auditorium was introduced by Wagner at Bayreuth in 1876; Renoir later remembered the upset he had caused by lighting a match in the dark auditorium on a visit to Bayreuth in 1896 (Ambroise Vollard, En ecoutant Cezanne, Degas, Renoir, Paris, 1938, p. 205).

Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at 'La loge'

'Well,' he said, speaking very slowly and precisely, 'we could certainly find room for you. I suspect you all have come a long way to be at Uncle John's funeral. I am his nephew, Theodore Roosevelt Hurt.'

Rythm Oil: A Journey through the Music of the American South by Stanley Booth

Yet whatever the pacts and promises of peace, there remained for France the problem of the hereditary enemy beyond the Rhine. Alike in victory and defeat, she seemed fated always to gaze uneasily eastward, aware, as the military historian Lidell Hart wrote in 1927, "that there lies the foe of tomorrow as of yesterday." Germany might be beaten and disarmed and the Rhineland demilitarized, with the satisfaction which this gave France that in any new war the fighting would be on German, not French soil. But the hard fact was that after the evacuation of the Rhineland, fixed for 1935, France would confront, across a common border and a narrow ribbon of water, a historically hostile and warlike nation whose population was half again as great as hers.

The Ides of May: the Defeat of France, May-June, 1940 by John Williams

Nat put Stephanie to bed. She was ten and would be in fourth grade if there was any school left. For a while Miss Farmer and Mrs. Martinez tried to do classes, but as it sank into people's minds that man's time as Earth's master was over, classes ended. Nat and the people on the block raided Bowie Elementary School for books and globes and scissors and glue and colored paper. He had raided Terra Toys in Austin. There were still people or things like people in Austin. Then that was before the Shining Waves passed through. The empty houses across the way were filled with stuffed animals. He thought it would make the world less scary for Stephanie if she saw windows full of white bears and blue horses.

From the short story "Sanctuary" by Don Webb
Collected in Cthulhu's Reign (Darrell Schweitzer, ed.)

Then you may depend upon it that it was a great deal more her fault than his, ma'am! And although I suppose he ought to have married her in the end I can't help thinking that she only came by her deserts when he didn't. In fact, I begin to feel almost sorry for the Wicked Baron. Does he mean to make a long stay in Yorkshire? Shall we be obliged to recognize him?

Venetia by Georgette Heyer

Jinx and Elfwyn collapsed beside the fire, gasping. The snarl, yap, and squall of werewolves and nixies fighting was still going on a hundred yards away. Reven picked up his ax.

Jinx's Magic by Sage Blackwood

In his plays Jean stopped at confessions, he had discovered the power of formulas. His theatre always stopped with the 'concernable'. The expression made him laugh. Him. He alone. For Suzy too. But Suzy did not want Jean's bitterness. And Jean no longer had the loving courage to explain to his wife that this bitterness was respectable and healthy.

Cronus' Children by Yves Navarre. (I try not to look at the cover when I pick the book up because the missing apostrophe bugs me.)

"Your lives are about to become more important than any on earth. Be ready."

Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman. YA sci-fi

All the band needed to complete the new look was a snazzy name. Bix Reichner, another of the WPWA disc jockeys who hosted a big band show on the station, was also a songwriter. He knew Haley and Ferguson were looking for new material, and having heard Haley's "Dance with a Dolly" he also knew what they wanted. He took them a song called "Stop Beating Around the Mulberry Bush," which Haley snapped up for his next record. "Y'know," said Reichner, half joking, "with a name like Haley, you ought to call your group the Comets."

Bill Haley by John Swenson

The solution? Simple enough. Keep cars out of the parks. Cars and all other forms of motorized locomotion. As I have suggested in another book (1), the national parks should be for people, not for machines. Let the machines find their own national parks and keep out of ours.

Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains
by Eliot Porter photographer
Natural and Human History by Edward Abbey

(1)Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)

When I had been away for a week, Elise chose not to come to the station to meet me because, so far as I recall, she wanted to go to a lecture on the moon.

Marcel and Elise, Marcel Jouhandeau

I know now that every photo I have ever taken is a love letter to Maria. At that time, there were two things it was okay for us to talk about: Frieda and my photographs. Because Maria was an artist, I valued her feedback, and because she was an artist, it seemed appropriate for her to give it. I loved taking photos, and she could not resist talking to me about them. The photos were our language, our way of talking. She has seen every photo I have ever taken, and she always tells me how good they are - or aren't.

The Second-Chance Dog: A Love Story by Jon Katz

I took a deep breath. I wanted it all to spill out: that I had been contaminated, that the psychologist was hypnotizing us far more than we might have suspected. That the walls were made of living tissue. But I didn't. Instead, I "got my shit together," as my husband used to say. I got my shit together because we were going to go forward and the surveyor couldn't see what I saw, couldn't experience what I was experiencing. And I couldn't make her see it.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Coralette, it turned out, was a resident of the Notre Dame Hotel, which stood beside a drug rehabilitation center on West Eightieth Street. I had passed beneath its awning several times; it was a shabby little place, notable only for the grandiosity of its name and for a Coke machine that all but filled its lobby. Coralette's room was on the second floor, by the rear landing. Across the hall lived a tall, ungainly young black girl, a former addict who'd been enrolled in one of the programs at the building next door. The girl was severely retarded, with impaired speech and a pronounced mongoloid cast to her features, yet according to the scandalized Coralette she spent most of her time with a succession of men - criminals and fellow addicts, to judge by their appearance - from the s.r.o. hotels uptown. Occasionally she would bring one of the men back with her; more often she was out all night, and would return home in the morning barely able to report where she had been.

From the novella "Children of the Kingdom"* by T.E.D. Klein
Collected in Dark Gods

*first published in 1980, which accounts for the politically incorrect terminology

He had known her since he was a boy. As a young woman of twenty she had apprenticed with the town's original herbalist, and it was they whom Talmadge and Elsbeth approached when their mother was ill. Caroline Middey had traveled to the homestead to visit the cramped and foul-smelling miner's shack where Talmadge's mother lay under the heavy quilt, Talmadge's coat wrapped around her feet. Pale as a fish. She's going to die, said Caroline Middey to the children, who stood away in a spindly grove of apple trees. Even then, Caroline Middey was unflinching in her diagnoses. Do you understand? she said to the children. She told Talmadge and Elsbeth what to do to ease their mother's suffering, and then what to do afterward with her body. Elsbeth cried, but Talmadge had listened and tried to remember everything Caroline Middey was saying. Caroline Middey too was dry-eyed. Even then she did not pander to children. Who has a childhood, she often said, in these parts? When one was born, death was right there waiting for you, right there in the room. And she would know this because as well as being the herbalist she was also the town's midwife. You'd better learn to recognize his - death's - face right away, she said.

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Jim Gary kneed his horse forward. His eyes were hot and angry. "Mart," he said, "I always suspected there was a streak of coyote in you, but I never knowed you'd be this low-down. I don't like to remind anybody of what I done for him, but I recall a stampede I hauled you out of. Are you gon' to talk?"

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour; The Frontier Stories (Volume Two) "Man Riding West"

Any dynasty if you wait a sufficient number of lifetimes hits disaster and sure enough, after many adventures, here is the chaotic Frederick the Quarrelsome dying fighting the Hungarians and with no heir in 1246. The Babenbergs were finished and the Habsburgs began their clamber to greatness.

Danubia by Simon Winder

Lamennais announced the advent of paradise on earth promised by Christ and heralded in the principles of 1789. Christianity meant justice and the love of neighbour. Through its imminent realization, Satan's reign, which had introduced poverty and misery into the world, would be brought to an end and all would soon live as brothers in freedom and equality. Although Lamennais wrote of universal suffrage, association and the end of privilege and monopoly, his was a vision of moral renewal rather than political transformation. But in the writings of his German disciples, in particular William Weitling, this became the basis of an aggressive physical force argument for 'communism', for a return to the Christian principle of community of goods. The Bible was a revolutionary document, its message - 'hope lies only in your sword'.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Penguin Classics edition)
(from the prefatory material by editor Gareth Stedman Jones)

The last English writer to see a Spanish garrison in Milan was Thomas Addison, who was there in 1701, and until the close of the century those who came after him were to find the Austrians in possession, and so different we're the two centuries that no one now worried about his Protestanism, neither did anyone think the garrison interesting or alarming. The young Boswell hurried to Milan in 1765 after his ludicrous attempt to become the lover of an elderly countess in Turin; he saw the builders at work on the cathedral, as they had been for centuries, and he climbed to the roof. other run on sentences too tedious to type

A Traveller In Italy by H V Morton

"It is not my own poem," he said. "It is the saying of a man of India, but I like it so much that I have printed it on this scroll to hang there in the alcove where I can see it everyday." He took up the scroll and read these words:
"The children of God are very dear, but very queer-
Very nice, but very narrow."

The Big Wave by Pearl S Buck

"De par le roy, Brother Anthony; it would ill beseem you to cry 'help' or 'murder!' As luck would have it you have fallen into a trap. By calling you are a moralist, by nature a he-goat -- thus does the Almighty make fools of us! As a child of sin myself I readily sympathize with you; as a servant of the King your conduct constrains me to bid my men not only raise the rope about your neck but also literally to raise you to the tree, and as a sign, seal and signal carve the lily on its bark."

The Devil by Alfred Neumann

In the student slang of the Kansai area in those days, to 'tail' meant to follow after the girls like a turtle following the tail of a rabbit. Just to follow, without saying a word to them--that was 'tailing'.

When I Whistle, Shusaku Endo

"He sat in the middle of the seat with one child on each side of him for equity in the facilities for looking out. From time to time one saw a goat or a donkey and announced the fact in mixed French and English; then the other one would scramble over the old man to see the wonder. Howard spent most of the drive putting them back into their own seats."

but I like page 34 better: "The old man bustled round and cleared a heap of books from the only other chair in the room."

Pied Piper by Nevil Shute

>210 2wonderY:

"The old man bustled round and cleared a heap of books from the only other chair in the room."

Yeah, that's one I'm pretty sure that's one that more than a couple of folks around here can relate to. :)

I do not think I made any reply; for I had a sudden, queer feeling that the thing was not right. And then, in a minute, I called myself an ass; but I could not really shake off the feeling. I had another good look at the sea. I had a vague idea that something was different. The sea looked brighter, somehow, and the air clearer, I thought, and I missed something; but not much, you know. And it was not until a couple of days later, that I knew that it was several vessels on the horizon, which had been quite in sight before the mist, and now were gone.

The Ghost Pirates and others, Hodgson

(I don't want to disrupt the thread, but I can't help remarking, now that I've had another look at the para I've copied, the interesting punctuation & what sounds to me an American tinge in writing of a Briton born in the 1870's and, most important, that the Prix de la Page 111 for 2014 has just been awarded. It's a French prize given to the writer whose book's 111th page is the best of all, and I wonder whether the poster who OP says s/he nicked the idea for this thread from got the idea from the prize.)

I allowed Ryan to catch up, then gave him a "don't bring it up" look. I did not want to discuss wolves.

Fatal Voyage by Kahy Reichs

From The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R.A. Dick:

"Tell me about it, what is the next world really like?" said Lucy.

There was a long silence. "No," said Captain Gregg at last, "it's too difficult. ... I mean it would be like handing you a crib in a difficult grading exam in languages. You might pass out of the first grade all right, but unless you'd sweated the words out for yourself and made them your own, you'd soon fail in the higher grade. ..."

"But ... I just want to know as a matter of curiosity what the next world is really like." protested Lucy. "Do you have wings and float about on clouds all day, playing golden harps, and where do you sleep at night?'

"Did I say you were in the first grade?" asked Captain Gregg in disgust. "Dammit, you're no higher than the kindergarten."

He now had the good fortune to be invited aboard a little Citroen van, driven by a zigzagging lush, an avid collector, as he confided, of Breathalyzer balloons. He bought them in batches of twelve or fifteen and served them to his mother-in-law at dinner, hidden in the pureed peas or beneath the crusted cheese atop her onion soup.

The Collaborators

From Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier:

Then he turned to me and spoke. "A little while ago you talked about an invention," he said, "some scheme for capturing a memory. You would like, you told me, at a chosen moment to live the past again. I'm afraid I think rather differently from you. All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them. Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up to that time. Those days are finished. They are blotted out. I must begin living again. The first day we met, your Mrs. Van Hopper asked me why I came to Monte Carlo. It put a stopper on those memories you would like to resurrect. It does not always work, of course; sometimes the scent is too strong for the bottle, and too strong for me. And then the devil in one, like a furtive Peeping Tom, tries to draw the cork. I did that in the first drive we took together. When we climbed the hills and looked down over the precipice. I was there some years ago, with my wife. You asked me if it was still the same, if it had changed at all. It was just the same, but- I was thankful to realize- oddly impersonal. There was no suggestion of the other time. She and I had left no record. It may have been because you were with me. You have blotted out the past for me, you, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo. But for you I should have left long ago, gone on to Italy, and Greece, and further still perhaps. You have spared me all those wanderings. Damn your puritanical little tight-lipped speech to me. Damn your idea of my kindness and my charity. I ask you to come with me because I want you and your company, and if you don't believe me you can leave the car now and find your own way home. Go on, open the door, and get out."

For those who have no appetite, the first pangs of hunger are a source of both suffering and illumination. As a child I was apathetic, a virtual invalid, my posture so poor you would have taken me for a hunchback, and I only managed to get through my everyday life thanks to my ignorance of any alternatives. My lack of interest verged on the void: nothing spoke to me, nothing aroused me and, like a helpless wisp borne this way and that upon some mysterious wind, I was not even aware of any desire to put an end to my existence.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

"If I drop my hat, I don't want a dozen people stepping forward to pick it up for me; it makes me embarassed. I want to pick it up myself."
"No one is going to pick up your hat for you at the Delamore Hotel in Kensington," Roenna said and smiled without bitterness.
"...Oh look, there's a taxi -if you'd just wave to him..."
"But surely we can go to Kensington by tube? It's just as quick, besides being considerably cheaper," Simon said.

- Reluctant Millionaire by Maysie Greig

Sola's duties were now doubled, as she was compelled to care for the young Martian as well as for me, but neither one of us required much attention, and as we were both about equally advanced in Martian education, Sola took it upon herself to train us together.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Ana pososhok?" Sergei asked as he passed me a plastic cup filled with two fingers of vodka. Midnight In Siberia by David Greene.

And of course I should have known straight away--it was so obvious. But I suppose we all have blind spells when we can't see what is pushed in front of our eyes, and for a few days I played around with that calf in a haze of ignorance, giving it this and that medicine which I'd rather not talk about.

All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot

He served the Montepulciano. The aroma of it--a mellow, winy tapestry, woven patiently by six decades of time in some dark Apennine crypt--filled the room. We were not alone. History, art, and religion crowded in with the music of trumpets and gnawing horns. General Padiglione murmured as if in a prayer. The purple reflecting against his thin, marmoreal face colored it like a portrait in a church window. He drank reverently, in the minutest of sips. Pierre, in the silence, inaudibly slid before each guest a salad of cress lightly tumbled in oil.

"Wine is made to drink!" shouted Guido. "Pour it down!"

-- High Bonnet by Idwal Jones

Nothing appeared to matter any more. A great calm had settled over the waters and over John Quincy's soul. The Pacific was one vast sheet of glass, growing a deeper blue with every passing hour. They seemed to be floating in space in a world where nothing ever happened, nothing could happen. Quiet restful days gave way to long brilliant nights. A little walk, a little talk, and that was life.

-- The House without a Key, the first Charlie Chan mystery, written in 1925 by Earl Derr Biggers

"So me and Buddy are loading up a truck with stuff to take to her dad's plane" - he said it nonchalantly, as if everyone had their own
plane - "and Danielle and her dad are going at it, him telling her all the things she's not going to do when she's back under his roof, blah, blah, blah. And he grabs her, and I put down the dresser I was holding because I got a problem when things get physical."

Ice Shear M.P. Cooley

Jaegar certainly knows how to make himself comfortable. When Munch comes to visit him, cell No. 1 has curtains, assorted paintings, and an antique Black Forest clock with weights and pendulum.

The Story of Edvard Munch by Ketil Bjornstad

Johnny went regularly to Los Angeles rock clubs while he continued to think of ways to take his rightful position in the music industry. Surrounding himself in the crowded bars he listened to rock bands performing with disdain but he took pleasure in imagining himself in large arenas packed with devoted fans of his perfect music. He would simply replace the face of the lead singers with his own and then he could tolerate being there while they played. But in these places he also found many people he could take from either with buying him drinks or taking him home for an extended free life living off them.

In the evenings, now, he would limp to the entrance of his cave and listen to the chanting of the Essenes as they offered up their evening prayer. For some obscure reason, the monotonous chanting would bring tears to his eyes and he would begin to sob uncontrollably.

Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock

To our disappointment the panel eluded our every effort to negotiate its secret lock. We felt that once beyond it we might look with some little hope of success for a passage to the outside world.

The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The bus sped down the Cascades like a skier. Then the road flattened. Brent saw a man point. He turned and beheld a peak in the distance that seemed a mirage, impossibly high, snow shimmering on its wide shoulders, the absolute lord of the landscape. The word 'Rainier' passed down the aisle. Brent gawked. It seemed too large, as a full moon does when it first rises into view. He'd never been west of Chicago before. He was sure he was there now.

Whirligig by Paul Fleischman, a terrific little book!

Disposing of toxic waste soon became the primary limit on growth. Firms could carry some on their own balance sheets, and more could be fobbed off on innocents like newly wealthy Indian tribes and doctors' retirement funds, but those were small markets. The secret of Kidder's growth is that it had been purchased by a deep-pocketed partner, GE, with an almost unlimited balance sheet and not a clue about what Kidder was up to. For an adventurous trader, dumb money is like a fairy godmother.

-- The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris

Your son? Your son? Shekiba thought, her mind suddenly clear and focused. Your son was my father. When was the last time you saw him? When was the last time you bothered to send him any food, any oil? You could see him in the field. You could see the pain in his movements. Did you bother to send him anything then? All you cared about was giving him another wife, saving the family name.

The Pearl that Broke Its shell by Nadia Hashimi

"Lack of self-sacrificial spirit!" Laurids fumed when Little Clausen had concluded his reading. "That pastor's got a nerve! Seven men are dead and the rest of us are prisoners. We're prepared to give up our lives. But is that enough for him, the devil? No: he wants our ships, too. But he won't get them. Never!" The others nodded their agreement.

-- We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

"You knew my answer, Phaidor," I replied, "before ever you spoke. Make way," I cried to the guards, "for John Carter, Prince of Helium, would pass!"

The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

ETA: Touchstones

Our friend Gus Chambers up on Swiftcurrent Lookout in the center of the park spots the first genuine park fire of the season. (And the only one, as it turns out.) He gives his azimuth reading, the UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) coordinates, locates it one kilometer south-southeast of Redhorn Lake. No one can see the fire but Gus; we other lookouts are sick with envy and rage. One snag burning in a small valley, remote from any trail; too windy for smoke jumpers, fire fighters are flown to scene by helicopter.

The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West by Edward Abbey
Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge

She faced him, unsteady in the starlight. "I'll never have a family like Mary," She muttered. "It's so unfair. Even if you took me to bed tonight I'd never have a family, because there wouldn't be time." She laughed hysterically. "It's really damn funny. Mary was afraid that you'd start bursting into tears when you saw the baby and the nappies hanging on the line. Like the squadron leader in the R.A.F. they had before." Her words began to slur. "Keep him occ . . . occupied." She swayed, and caught a post of the verandah. "That's what she said. Never a dull moment. Don't let him see the baby or perhaps . . . perhaps he'll start crying." The tears began to trickle down her cheeks. "She never thought it might be me who'd do the crying, and not you."

On the Beach Nevil Shute

. . . As children we called her, always, Mummy or Mum--words which sound so silly on adult lips that we all three felt we ought to change them. My brother tried to change to Mother, but it never sounded convincing and now he's slipped back to Mum. My sister and I both adopted Ma, which seems to have to English ears a faintly jokey sound which makes it sound less embarrassing than Mummy (which we still use, sometimes, between us). Quite often we call her Gran, that having been established by the grandchildren. She doesn't mind what we call her. When she was a young modern mother I remember her taking it into her head that we ought to call her and Dad by their first names. 'What a flighty and ridiculous notion' we all three thought in a disapproving way, so poor Ma's bid to be dashing came to nothing.

Instead of a Book, Diana Athill

(Given that Athill was born in 1917 her mother sounds impressively modern, especially for an English colonel's wife . . . )

By the nineteenth century, Europeans had become positively manic for travelling troupes of freaks, monkeys, leopards, giants, jugglers, and other such wonders. But something sinister was at work. The extravagance at Regents Park was also about displaying the wealth and majesty of empire. That's the other thing about grand bestiaries. They serve an ancient, obsessive desire of warlords, magnates, and kings to acquire, bequeath, trade, and display exotic, strange, and magnificent wild animals.

The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind
by Terry Glavin

Instead of a Book

Why would touchstones suggest The Little Prince first off? Weird.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness.

Now follow me closely, just pretend you're still at school, or that we're doing a waltz; considering that from seventy metres of height the aerial trajectory of the torpedo is around three hundred metres, and considering that once it's in the water the torpedo takes another two hundred metres to stabilise at a depth tared on land, and that can vary from two to eight metres depending on the ship you're aiming at, the conclusion is that the minimum distance from which the torpedo can be fired is five hundred metres. In addition, if you fired it from farther off, let's say from one thousand metres, the time it takes for the torpedo to reach even the slowest of vessels would be sufficent to allow the vessel to turn, or get away. A splash in the water beneath an aeroplane coming up at top speed--they would see the whole thing from the ship and from that moment they had their chance to do their own dance steps, for us it was awesome to see a battleship on the other side of the windscreen, remember we were flying roughtly level with the bulwarks, to see it pull aournd as fast as it could, it prow throwing cascades of water into the air, racing against the time it would take the torpedo to strike it.

Take-Off, Daniele del Guidice

(So sorry. Another silly link that I'll throw to combiners group who will no doubt correct it as they did my last silly link.)

Connor knows while he's treading water, Proactive Citizenry is casting their formidable spells out there. More ads to mystify and befuddle the public. Are people really such sheep that they can be fooled? Maybe. Or maybe with so much conflicting media, people just shut down. Maybe that's the point. The movement to overthrow Cap-17 keeps gaining supporters. Measures calling for more harvest camps, and more ways to legally unwind "incorrigibles" keep gaining traction. The pundits are actually calling it the Starkey Factor. What's been obvious to Connor now has been officially defined. Starkey and his storks spread more and more terror with every harvest camp they take down, but rather than dealing a blow to unwinding, those brutal, bloody attacks drive the public to embrace anything and anyone who promises to make the Starkeys of the world go away. Forever.

UnDivided, Book 4 in the Unwind Dystology by Neal Shusterman

>242 nrmay: Haha! It took me a few beats to determine that your book was fiction.

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with it's wings.
Alice in Wonderland.

March 14, 1939
News from Central Europe is becoming increasingly grave. For the first time von Ribbentrop has spoken with Attolico and has given him to understand that the German program has been completed; namely, to incorporate Bohemia, to make Slovakia a vassal state, and to yield Ruthenia to the Hungarians. It is not known as yet when all this will take place, but such an event is destined to produce the most sinister impression on the Italian people. The Axis functions only in favor of one of its parts, which tends to have preponderant proportions, and it acts entirely on its own initiative, with little regard for us. I express my point of view to the Duce. He was cautious in his reaction and did not seem to attach great importance to the event. He has sought a counterproposal with reference to the advantages which Hungary will have upon achieving a common frontier with the Poles and he had me tell Budapest to move boldly. But to me this seems very little.

-- The Ciano Diaries 1939-43 by Galeazzo Ciano
(Ciano was Mussolini's Foreign Minister and also his son-in-law. It is interesting to see a high-ranking Italian official expressing such strong doubts about the advantages of an alliance with Germany before the official military pact between the two, and Japan, was even signed. Ciano would later take part in the coup that removed Mussolini from power. He was ultimately arrested by the Gestapo and, several months later, executed.)

Tom's eyes had turned black. But he retreated another step, still clutching the briefcase in his hands. Tom had worked many years at the railway, but Ove had never heard any of his father's colleagues say one good word about Tom. He was dishonest and malicious, that was what they said after a couple of bottles of pilsner at their parties. But he'd never heard it from his dad. "Four children and a sick wife," was all he used to say to his workmates, looking each of them in the eye. "Better men than Tom could have ended up worse for it." And then his workmates usually changed the subject.

A Man Called Ove Fredrik Backman

All that night he forged ahead until, with the dawning of a new day, he entered the low foothills that guard the approach to the fastness of the mountains of Torquas.

Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Dr. Lartigueʻs study, filled
with so many books that they of overflowed the shelves and stood in stacks as tall as a school age boy; stone sculptures, frayed textiles, paintings of pyramids and tattooed gods that leaned against the towers of books."

- - "The Widowerʻs Tale
by Julia Glass

Glassʻs writing is as packed as the library/museum space described here. She doesnʻt have JamesJoyceʻs love of language just for the sake of language, but as with his U and FW, you get the feeling that everything is significant; nothing is trivial --trivial as it may superficially seem.

Questions tumble in my mind, competing for attention. Who rescued me? Did they find the assassin? How badly am I hurt? Where are Mara and Ximena? Did I imagine Rosario cuddled beside me in the dead of night?

The Crown of Embers by Rae Carson. YA fantasy.

CHAP. XXXIX . . .

3. "A cloud then snatched me up, and the wind raised me above the surface of the earth, placing me at the extremity of the heavens.

4. There I saw another vision; I saw the habitations and couches of the saints. . ." .

The Book of Enoch the Prophet
Tr. by Richard Laurence
(Reprint of) Original 1883 ed.
This ed.: 2000

At head of cover title: One of the "Lost Books" of the Bible, found in an Ethiopian monastery.

>237 fyrfly: "The Sixth Extinction" looks like an interesting book; added to my wishlist. Thanks!

"As for why we need the station, just look at the research that's being conducted in biology and medicine. Materials science. Geophysics. We'll see the benefits of this reserach in our own lifetimes."

Gravity by Tess Gerritsen

I'm amazed every time I think about the pure, steel-like conviction my mom had. She would not be deterred even when her friends and family told her that she was crazy to do this, that she didn't know what was going on in Tijuana. "You're crazy -- what if he doesn't take you back?"

"Oh, he's going to take me back. If he's not, he's got to look me in the eye and say that -- and look in his children's eyes."

-- The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana

"Crivens! It's a' verra well sayin' 'find the hag,' but what should we be lookin' for, can ye tell me that? All these bigjobs look just the same tae me!"

Wee Free Men Terry Pratchett

Das Erz hat Heimweh. Und verlassen
Will es die Münzen und die Räder
Die es ein kleines Leben lehren.
* /The ore is homesick; it is eager
To leave the coins and turning wheels
That leave it a life so meagre.

Poems: Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke
Tr. by Babete Deutsch

So fascinated was Tara of Helium that she could scarce take her eyes from the strange creatures—a fact that was to prove her undoing, for in order that she might see them she was forced to expose a part of her own head and presently, to her consternation, she saw that one of the creatures had stopped his work and was staring directly at her. She did not dare move, for it was still possible that the thing had not seen her, or at least was only suspicious that some creature lay hid among the weeds. If she could allay this suspicion by remaining motionless the creature might believe that he had been mistaken and return to his work; but, alas, such was not to be the case. She saw the thing call the attention of others to her and almost immediately four or five of them started to move in her direction.

The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Yes," replied Maui, "I will snare
(the sun) like a sitting bird.ʻ*

Maori Myths and Legendary Tales
by A. W. Reed

*This myth is found in both
Hawaiʻi and Aotearoa (New Zealand.

"Do YOU want to be the one to tell Big Savings?" asked Peaches sweetly. Big Savings was the old head female, widely agreed to have a bite like a pickaxe and muscles like rock. She also had a short temper with males. Even Hamnpork kept out of her way when she was in a bad mood.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents Terry Pratchett

"What mystic promise has not been kept

Weʻve journeyed among the days of the future
Weʻve timed our eyes to petrify omens in fight
We heard the spirit from Mars berate reactionary stars

We learned that hopes of happiness exist beyond
our sphere
that all living intelligence is of good cheer
of honesty without prevarication
of prophecies free of gloom
. . . . ."

from "Mutation of the Spirit"
by Gregory Corso* (in: "Wholly Communion:
International Poetry Reading at the
Royal Albert Hall, London, June 11, 1965"

*Met author.

It was dark by the time we reached the farm. It was exactly what I'd been expecting; long and low, with turf eaves a foot off the ground, turf walls over a light timber frame. No trees this high up, so lumber had to come up the coast on a big shallow-draught freighter as far as Holy Trinity, then road haulage the rest of the way. I spent the first fifteen years of my life sleeping under turf, and I still get nightmares.

Academic Exercises
K.J. Parker

This was not supposed to happen just yet. They were supposed to be there until closing time, when the cafe would be empty of innocents.

Sentinel by Matthew Dunn

The World's Most Transparent Man, she called him. "Don't ever consider a life of crime", she advised. "You decide to rob a bank, the cops will know which one before you do".

from Empire Falls.

He found a room in a white wooden house, close to the main road of the village, with black shutters flanking the windows. The shutters were decorative, never opening or closing as they did throughout the day in Calcutta, to keep rooms cool or dry, to block rain or let in a breeze or adjust the light.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

"The second group of four rocky moons,
(of Jupiter) The Gaileans, is itself divided
into two rocky worlds: Io and Europa, then two
massive gas-and-ice moons, the size of
planets: Ganymede and Callisto."

A Little book of Coincidence
written and illus. by John Martineau

On the monitor screen, Sutler nodded, paused for just an instant's thought, then added, "I want Prothero to speak tonight on the dangers of these old buildings, and how we must avoid clinging to the edifice of a decadent past. He should conclude by saying that the New Bailey will become a symbol of our time, and of the future that our conviction has rewarded us with."

V for Vendetta (novelization) by Steve Moore

ETA: misspelled we (how embarrassing!)

Since baseball is primarily a sport where stories of the past are most important, no recent history of baseball in New York is complete without them. One is of a great Sunday game played between the Dodgers and the Giants at Ebbets Field in June of 1949. Actually, much of the action centers on the night before in a place called the Red Parrot, which was a saloon, not a very nice one, either, on Myrtle Avenue in the Glendale section of Queens, a fifteen minute drive from Ebbets Field.

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin

"Men from Roman Africa were now coming to
the fore in interesting numbers, entering the
Senate or gaining important procuratorial
posts. As early as 80 (A.D.) , a man from Lepcis
(modern Constantine in Algeria) was made
consul: Q. Aurelius Pactumeius Fronto. It
was a slow process at first, but a as it gathered
momentum, there began to be as it were a
geometric progression the advancement of men
from this region. They gave one another a
helping hand.

Septimius Severus: the African Emperor
by Anthony Birley

In The Other, a book of lectures about shifting identities in the modern world, Riszard Kapuscinski writes of the many people for whom the world outside is a source of anxiety, arousing fear of the unexpected, or even the terror of death. Every culture has a whole set of charms and magic spells designed to protect anyone setting off on the road, who is bid farewell amid outbursts of weeping and regret as if he were about to climb the scaffold.

In Another World: Among Europe's Dying Villages by Tom Pow.

The night was quiet except for the usual distant sounds that I had heard ever since I had been here--sounds that I had interpreted as the cries of savage beasts. Once I had asked Ras Thavas about them, but he had been in ill humor and had ignored my question. I reached the ground quickly and without hesitation moved directly to the nearest entrance of the building, having previously searched out and determined upon the route I would follow to the vault. No one was visible and I was confident, when at last I reached the doorway, that I had come through undetected. Valla Dia was so happy to see me again that it almost brought the tears to my eyes.

The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

London does seem to have an awkward relationship with its remaining lamps. While national heritage laws protect the lamps from being removed, apparently nothing in those laws protects them from being overwhelmed by electric light.

The End of Night by Paul Bogard

"Christ is at the heart of the universe.
St. Paul says, ʻIn and through and for Him, all
things consist. All things hold together in
Him.ʻ He sustains the whole universe."

The Cosmic Revelation: the Hindu
Way to God by Bede Griffiths

In Zollverein, in the spring of Werner's tenth year, the two oldest boys at Children's House -- thirteen-year-old Hans Schilzer and fourteen-year-old Herribert Pomsel -- shoulder secondhand knapsacks and goose-step into the woods. When they come back, they are members of the Hitler Youth.

All the Light We Cannot See

According to the scientists, we in Tehran take in seven and a half times the amount of carbon monoxide that is considered safe. This information starts to mean something only after ten days or two weeks without rain, without wind. One morning, you look towards the Alborz Mountains and they're not there. Rather, they are impressionistically there. They're lurking behind a haze that's pink-grey, like the gills of an old fish. If you go out for long, you get cruel headaches for which lemon juice and olives are the recommended cures. Windless weekdays are said to carry away scores of old people, all of them poisoned. In the town centre, there's a pollution meter whose optimistic readings, naturally, no one believes. The sunsets look like nuclear winters.

-- In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: a Memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue

"Freudʻs theory of dreams: he wants
to say that whatever happens in a dream
will be found to be connected with some
wish which analysis can bring to light.
But this procedure of free association and
so on is queer, because Freud never shows
how we know where to stop - - where is the
right solution."

WITTGENSTEIN (notes by R(ush) R(hees)
after a conversation, Summer, 1942)
in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Lectures
and Conversations
by Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The important thought to hold on to is that for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn't do much of anything but procreate and survive. Then people all over the world discovered farming, irrigation, writing, architecture, government, and other refinements of being that collectively add up to what we fondly call civilization. This has been many times described as the most momentous transformation in human history, and the first person who fully recognized and conceptualized the whole complex process was Vere Gordon Childe. He called it the Neolithic Revolution."

"At Home", by Bill Bryson

"In another room, three women from the same village are in various stages of pregnancy with complications, but the cost of a car ride could not be justified for just one, or even two of them. So the first two had to wait for the third to go into labor. Only then were they all three driven together, as fast as the car would go. Despite efforts to stem maternal mortality, Afghanistan still ranks among the world's worst countries to give birth in, on par with the poorest and most war-torn nations in Africa. But the odds for survival at this clinic, in the middle of a battlefield, are better than at a home birth."

The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg

Now, for the first time, I had a fairly good look at my companion, for both Cluros and Thuria were in the heavens and it was quite light. If I revealed my surprise it is not to be wondered at for, in the darkness, having only my companion's voice for a guide, I had been perfectly confident that I had given aid to a female, but now as I looked at that short hair and boyish face I did not know what to think; nor did the harness that my companion wore aid me in justifying my first conclusion, since it was quite evidently the harness of a man.

A Fighting Man of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"You are not truly amused," the padre told him coldly; Moon stopped smiling. "You did not answer my question - who are you, Mr. Moon? I did not ask what you were." Xantes considered him a moment; they nodded at each other. "You are an educated man. In the times we have talked, I have found it entertaining. It is too bad we work against each other, no? In a stupid world?" He bowed.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen

There had come into the world two new forms of physical energy. To speak of them merely as additions to man's stores of available power would be understatement, for each of the new forms was greater than the sum of all the energy that man had turned to his use in all preceding time; each was far greater--taking into account its mobility, its adaptability to diffusion--than the sum of all the muscles of men, added to all the muscles of horses and oxen, added to all the water-wheels, added to all the wind-mills, added, even, to the other of man's comparatively recent acquisitions, steam.

Our Times: The United States 1900-1925 - Part IV, The War Begins 1909-1914 by Mark Sullivan (Sullivan was speaking of electricity and the internal combustion engine.)

"Inasmuch as the active application ofʻ
language is speech, it is upon speech that
writing, essentially a secondary means of
communication, is dependent."

Lost Languages by P. E. Cleator

Sorry, 280 was intended for
the "First Sentence..." Thread.

From p. 42 of Lost Languages (280) is:

"(I)t was evident that in the demotic
script. the cartouche (of Egyptian), though
not dispensed with in its entirety, was so
abbreviated and amended, that it was
represented only by its ends."

From what he had been told, the new apartment had one room more than their old one in the fifteenth arrondissement, their home for the past twelve years. The landlord had protested at their sudden departure, as had Jerome's headmistress. Daniel had used the phrase: 'I'm so sorry, but in life there are some circumstances. . .' He took care to leave his words hanging, pregnant with meaning, a black hole absorbing any and all objections. What can you say to a man compelled by such mysterious, irresistible forces? Nothing, of course.

The President's Hat
Antoine Laurain

"(Tiberius) appears to have genuinely
loved* his (first) wife."

A Dark History: the Roman Emperors
from Julius Caesar to the Fall of Rome
by Michael Kerrigan

*love: the exception not the rule,
in Roman royaltyʻs arranged marriages.

There's no way to - pardon the pun - intelligently discuss cognition without drawing the distinction between what has been scientifically proven and what most people believe based on interpretations of their own day to day experience with dogs. This topic tends to leave people cold, as though science rains on some sort of confabulation parade. But the (very interesting) fact of the matter is, there is enormous discrepancy in key areas between what people think dogs are good at and what dogs are actually good at as soon as other explanations are ruled out. It's why we love science so. Let me give you an example.

Oh Behave! Dogs from Pavlov to Premack to Pinker by Jean Donaldson

(I hate to miss a pun, but I donʻt
get what is the pun you are asking
pardon for in the first sentence of
284!?)

THIS IS ABOUT TO SPLIT

Shy
HEAD

NECK
Sun

THORAX
Mountain

ARM
River

PELVIS
Ship

House
FOREARM

Tree
HAND

Dog
THIGH

LEG
Leg

Shoes
FOOT

Moving property
TALKING OR WALKING

The Mechanism of Meaning, Arakawa

(rolandperkins, all I can think is that it's a pun on something in last sentence of previous paragraph--?)

When I read Kon-Tiki, it was only six years after the end of World War II. But when you're not yet ten, six years is a realm of pure history. For adults, the mythic Pacific that pervaded postwar middlebrow culture was a way of remembering the war nor as a European nightmare but as new chapter in manifest destiny - and to put a happy face on both the atomic nightmare and the prophetically bumbled Korean "police action." For a kid, though, it was just stories: Iwo Jima and The Caine Mutiny, which I absorbed at the time, The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity, which I got to a big five or ten years later. Mailer's novel had its own profound effect on me. But not like South Pacific.

Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man by Robert Christgau

(from p 42 of the e-book)

"But isn't it hard, sir," Beatrice asked, "to see what truly lies in people's hearts? Appearances deceive so easily."

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

"During my first term as governor
(of Hawaiʻi), I appointed (William) Quinn
to the East-West Center Board of Governors.
Unknown to many, Bill Quinn had a role in
the beginnings of the East-West Center, for
which he never got much credit."

Ben: A Memoir From Street Kid to Governor

by Benjamin J.. Cayetano*

*Met author.

{Robert Morris} began sending a series of circular letters to the states in which he apprised the governors that the annual requisitions were mandatory obligations, not charitable requests. "As to the complaint made by the People of a want of money to pay their taxes," he observed, "it is nothing new to me, nor indeed to anybody. The Complaint is I believe quite as old as Taxation itself, and will last as long." All of a sudden there was a decisive presence in charge of fiscal policy, declaring that the days of mounting debt and routinized recalcitrance were over. "It is high time to relieve ourselves from the Infamy we have already sustained and to rescue and restore the public credit," he lectured. "This can only be done by solid revenue. . . . We may be as happy or miserable as we please."

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis

(footnote 3) Marcus is here quoting an old proverb, also quoted by Menander, applying to the rich man whose house is so full of treasures that there is no place left to relieve oneself. It was obviously well known; Marcus actually refers to it by quoting only the first few and last words. A similar comment on ostentatious wealth is found in the story told of Diogenes the Cynic who spat in his host's face as he could find no other place in the house to spit.

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Janai, the girl from Amhor, sat apart. Her situation seemed to me pathetic in the extreme--a lone woman incarcerated with seven strange men in a city of hideous enemies. We red men of Barsoom are naturally a chivalrous race; but men are men, and I knew nothing of the five whom we had found here. As long as John Carter and I remained her fellow prisoners she would be safe; that I knew, and I thought that if she knew it, any burden of apprehension she might be carrying would be lightened.

Synthetic Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"With his lower right hand Shiva makes
a beautiful gesture called the abhaya mudra,
the symbol of the removal of fear. The idea
of fearlessness is one of the great principles
in the Sannyasa tradition, which is something
like the monastic tradition in the West."

The Cosmic Revelation: the Hindu Way to God
by Bede Griffiths

Beyond them lies Invierne, Storm's homeland, my enemy, a country no one from Joya d'Arena has been allowed to set foot in for centuries. And yet they have invited me - no, coerced me - to come. To trade my life for Hector's. To offer myself as a living, willing sacrifice toward an end I cannot guess.

The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson

The man who slices sausages is a counterfeiter of coins.
***
To be punctual is to have the comfort of accepting another's apology instead of giving one's own.
***
The passengers of an airplane which has just landed emerge looking so proud that you would think they had spoken with God and were bringing us his message.
***
Bridges civilize rivers.

Aphorisms by Ramon Gomez de la Serna

>295 bluepiano:

I love the second one. :)

>296 artturnerjr:, yeah--the book's worth checking out. Sorry I couldn't get a link.

>297 bluepiano:

It appears that LT is listing it under its Spanish title (Greguerias); that might have been the problem.

Their workshops also produced items of amber, glass, enamel, wood and graphite. The surviving examples of their stone sculpture are few, and are mostly of human heads and highly stylied animals. They never mastered the art of stonecutting, and their statuary is clumsy and unrefined. But the Celts excelled at soldering, embossing and inlaying, and invented the technique of coral encrustation. They used lathes and drawing compasses, and their extraordinary level of technology and craftsmanship was unsurpassed in Europe until the eighteenth century.

Caesar Against the Celts
Ramon L. Jimenez

Whatever shape the rolled-up extra dimensions take, and however many there are, at each point along the infinite dimensions there would be a small compact space containing all the curled-up dimensions. So, for example, if string theorists are right, everywhere in visible space--at the tip of your nose, at the North Pole of Venus, at the spot above the tennis court where your racket hit the ball the last time you served--there would be a six-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold of invisibly tiny size. The higher-dimensional geometry would be present at every point in space.

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall

"Speak up, son. It is ungentlemanly to stare." Mr. Knox's words alerted me to the fact that I had been addressed by Wedlock, who was looking down at me now with his good eye turned my way and a guarded smile that showed an even row of white teeth. Still I said nothing. The artificial orb glittered in its ebony setting.

Sudden Country by Loren Estelman

It was quite a battle. That ulsio was the most ferocious and most determined beast I had ever seen, and it gave Pan Dan Chee the fight of his life. He had knocked off two of its six legs, an ear, and most of its teeth before the ferocity of its repeated attacks abated at all. It was almost cut to ribbons, yet it always forced the fighting. I could only stand and look on, which is not such a part in a fight as I like to take. At last, however, it was over; the ulsio was dead, and Pan Dan Chee looked at me and smiled.

Llana of Gathol by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Martha inserted the nipple into Faith's mouth and began rocking hard, more to calm herself than to soothe the baby. Her mind was confused. No baby had stopped breathing since she'd been there, and Faith had been stable all this time, so Martha assumed she was all right. But she knew one of the babies had to get worse sometime. Logically, if babies got better, babies could also get worse. And she did have that heart lesion. What if she stopped breathing? Martha looked at her. Faith's eyes were squeezed shut, her lips pulling milk from the nipple. She seemed peaceful, all her efforts focused on eating.

Rocking the Babies by Linda Raymond. Winner of the American Book Award, 1995.

The maitre d' swooped down on her like a vulture on roadkill. "Mademoiselle. I regret, we cannot seat walk-ins."

Innocent in Death by J.D. Robb

Where is my baby now? Sondra wondred in despair, She'd been in agony since yesterday. As soon as she checked into the hotel, she had phoned the rectory and said she was a reporter following up on the story of the baby who had been left on the stoop of the rectory on December 3rd, seven years ago.

All through the Night Mary Higgins Clark

page 42 is blank. wandered over to page 43

At the Kestrel's lock, Boss Watts took Bel aside for a low voiced conversation with some anxious hand waving. Bel shook its head, made calm down gestures, and finally turned to follow Miles, Ekaterin and Roic through the flex tube and into the Kestrel's tiny and now overcrowded personnell hatch deck.

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold

" ʻNever was anything in the world loved too much,
but many things have been loved in false ways and
in all too short a measure.ʻ - - Thomas Traherne

ʻTo grasp God in all things - - this is the sign
of your new birth.ʻ - - Meister Eckhart "

Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in
Everyday Life
by Frederic and Mary Brussat

Don't Be His Drinking Buddy The one activity you should not keep doing together is substance abuse. Snowboarding does not destroy lives; drinking does. If his activity of choice is partying, don't assume that he will cut down on it when he has more responsibilities. Stop now in favor of a healthier and more active lifestyle. If he doesn't stop with you, know what to expect. If you can't stop, either don't start or get help now. If there is a Daredevil in your life, the one battle you must win is with substance abuse. We will discuss addiction more extensively in a few pages.

Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry by Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D.

"I could tell by your looks. Your secret was divulged by the way
your cheeks bulged. As the Talmud says, 'You can spot a gentleman
by his boots.'"

-- from the short story "Competitors," included in the collection, Tevye's Daughters, by Sholom Aleichem.

It makes no sound until the moment of its death, at which point it lets out a long scream made up of every sound it has ever heard, regurgitated backwards. Jobberknoll feathers are used in Truth Serums and Memory Potions.

Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them - Newt Scamander (J.K. Rowling)

"Oh. Oh, yes, of course," I said. I experienced a startling moment of panic. In employing this ruse to meet her, I had failed to consider the necessity of committing to it. In what room of my house was I willing to take off my clothes and have a stranger touch me? In no room at all. I must have looked as dumbfounded as I felt, because, trying to help, she asked, "The bedroom?"

The New Neighbor Leah Stewart

"Winnie screamed. She was a girl with a deformity of the face, a squashed-in nose and a pinched-up mouth, and a pinched-up nasal voice to match. 'Look what he's done!' she said to her friends. The other girls saw and started laughing."

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

"Johannes Vermeer (1632-75):
The Geographer

This study of a geographer holding his dividers and
bent over a map is a pair to a painting in the Louvre
which shows an astronomer in his study with his
hand outstretched toward a celestial globe. "

Dutch Painting by Christopher Brown

. . . What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man drive by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.

Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

Collected Poems 1909-1962, Eliot

(This was on page 41, actually, as the poem on p. 42 is a display of bigotry I can't bring myself to quote from in so pleasant a thread.)

Dominic still waited for his pilgrims, playing cards with anybody who passed by and occasionally indulging in target practice with some of the arsenal that he kept in his saddlebags. He shot outback, where the dead were buried and the building absorbed some of the noise between him and the horses. The strange thing is that is was during one of these sessions that he thought he saw the first one arrive. McAlister was at the well, Chava was in the canyons and the only other paying customer, a man called Morton, had no interest in playing cards. He read books. And because McAlister would not open the shutters, and the daylight outside would reflect off the white of the page and sear his eyeballs, he had to do this by candlelight. Morton could also only understand his books if he read aloud, which he constantly did in a slow, lifeless murmur. This gave the fetid interior a solemn and church-like ambience that drove Dominic to distraction.

Silenic Drift/Scales, Iain Sinclair & B. Catling

"This isn't your idea of a joke, is it, Vic?" Ralph demanded.

Total Recall by Sara Paretsky

"Unlike many historical expressions
of the one-world idea however, which focus in
particular on the establishment of world
government, the vision of the new age qua
planetary civilization arises less out of politics
than out of what is called the holistic vision.
This is the awareness that all life is inter-
related and interdependent . . . . ."

Emergence: the Rebirth of the Sacred
by David Spangler

He went to work every evening. He kissed my mother. He kissed me. He patted his coat, then left us. He sat on the landing floor outside and put on his leg. Then he was gone.

A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

"You've thought it over. You're reasonably shrewd. And you've known practically from birth that you are a target for every sharpie who comes along. So you develop an instinct. You know that something is wrong. It all adds up to one thing. Some people have managed to move in on Charlie Armister. They have gotten to him. They own him. Did you ever see a lamprey?"

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

He took his key and walked out with Chang. He said, "Don't take this wrong, but I want to come up to your room."

Make Me Lee Child

By the time he finished, it was only a page long. He liked to keep things brief. "Overload with facts," Durrie, his mentor, had once told him. "They can never fault you for that. Leave out all the cream puff stuff and opinions. Nobody wants that shit. And if you find somebody that does, they're not worth working for."

The Cleaner by Brett Battles

Another essay by Babson, 'Gravity and Ventilation', extols the wholesome practice of leaving every window open, at all times, summer and winter, whatever the weather. The author confesses to discovering the virtues of ventilation at a very young age. It was then that he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis but, thanks to a method of his own invention (refusing to close doors and windows), he regained his health in a few months. Later, as an adult, Babson continued to work in an office exposed to the elements, whether snow or howling wind, wrapped in his battery-heated overcoat. On certain days, the room was so cold that his secretary, swathed entirely in blankets, was forced to hit the typewriter keys with rubber hammers in unison with the founder's dictation.

The Temple of Iconoclasts by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

His face took on a sickly glow as they cruised into the village, its street lights washing them in orange. "I heard a story about you and some boy who tried to set up Paul McGinty. I heard you beat the life out of him."

The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

This gypsy girl was a Romany. They had their own language and sometimes they'd stop speaking it the moment they thought you might be listening, or, contrarily, they'd tip into it so that you couldn't understand. She was dark-skinned, with shiny black hair, and big gold rings through each earlobe. Her eyes were so dark that you couldn't see how big the pupils were. She was wearing a loose scarlet dress embroidered in gold and black, and a waistcoat that matched. When Daniel showed me his photographs of India after the war, I was struck by how similar the Hindus looked to our Romanies. The girl looked wonderful and exotic, but she was obviously cold, and she was diirty too.

The Dust that Falls From Dreams Louis De Bernieres

Now she looked full at him, the interest and wonder glowing in her face. Peter nodded, turning away. What was he thinking about? What made him look like that? She had seen him once in conversation with an older boy, listening intently yet as if he were hearing something else also--something in his own mind--at one point jerking his chin up slightly and saying a few rapid sentences that had ended the talk with a gesture of understanding on both sides. His face even in stillness held an expression which reminded her of that particular incident. Felicie thought of it as "independence" but the word wasn't good enough; she needed something else to express her sense of this quick, secret intelligence like a shifting light, or for that other look which she had seen only once or twice, a sort of hatred, mocking and exultant, that leaped up in his smile. When they told of his saying, "I would spit on the planters," she though of him smiling that way.

The Gentle Bush by Barbara Giles

"In the trenches of the Commerce Committee, I
did battle with this monster (the Carter Administrationʻs ʻMoral Equivalent of
Warʻ) every day, hacking away at it with a sword forged in the free market
smithy of F. A. Hayek. I became a militant anti-neo-Malthusian."

The Triumph of Politics: the Inside
Story of the Reagan Revolution
by David Stockman (c1986,1987)

Before we left the castle, we wrote the captain a letter as follows:

Damned Scoundrel!
We smelled your masquerade long before you put it to work. The two you beat up were peasant louts whom we sent in our place, and the messenger will be able to tell you how through our cunning things went for him on the way. We will, indeed, no longer enter your property, but if you get a craving to visit us, we will build a fire under you that will make steam come out of your trousers. We write this as a warning.

German Winter Nights, Johann Beer

"Look here," he said. "It so happens that your hotel suits my purposes very well. As I said, I need two rooms for one or two nights. Depends. Either way I have money to spend. Cash money." He took a fold of very new deutschmarks from his back pocket, slipped off a silver money clip, and counted five twenties on the desk in front of me. It was about five times the going rate on two rooms for two nights. "The kind of money that's a little shy of too many questions."

The One from the Other by Philip Kerr

Penny for them?

I was thinking that it's better to be loved for your money, because good looks don't rise by five percent a year.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that it's better to live in an ugly building with a view of a beautiful one than the other way around.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that if the answer to your question was me, then you didn't ask the right question.

A Thousand Pearls (For a Thousand Pennies) by le Tellier

This faith of the desert was impossible in the towns. It was at once too strange, too simple, too impalpable for export and common use. The idea, the ground-belief of all Semitic creeds, was waiting there, but it had to be diluted to be made comprehensible to us The scream of a bat was too shrill for many ears: the desert spirit escaped through our courser texture. The prophets returned from the desert with their glimpse of God, and through their stained medium (as through a dark glass) showed something of the majesty and brilliance whose full vision would blind, deafen, silence us, serve us as it had served the Beduin, setting him uncouth, a man apart.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence

He trusted no one. He always said, "Have three lawyers." He got independent opinions on everything. The lawyers did not like that, but too bad. Edgar cared only that the deal was solid. He taught me to always go to the top, go to the person who can give the answer, get the action. If you go too low, everybody up the ladder makes the decision over and over, one by one. I would worry about alienating the underlings. Not Edgar.

-- Still Talking by Joan Rivers

After her stint in Santa Barbara, she moved back to San Francisco and into a small apartment at 2490 Geary Street. She also wrote an original story for the screen and submitted it, with high hopes, to the Columbia Pictures story department. Called "The Brash Young Man," it was rooted in Pauline's frustrating experience in New York and her fear of losing her renegade outsider status. It centered on a character named Benjamin Burl, "brash, confident, pugnacious," who for years has been struggling to achieve literary success. Although he has talent, not one of his several novels has sold well, and his publisher has all but given up on him. Benjamin is very much a back number when he makes one more attempt at a novel. To his astonishment it catches on with the public and becomes a big seller. Benjamin becomes a belated literary "discovery," but success ruins his life:

He became modest and shy. All the fun had gone out of things: there was no one to quarrel with and shout at; he didn't have to convince people of his genius - they all agreed with him.

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow

". . . (T)he old man thought that tales of
Queen Guinevere might have drawn
partly from the forgotten legends.
"(Guiwenneth)ʻs lost from popular memory."
"But not from hidden memory?"

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Pongileoni surpassed himself in the final Badinerie. Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics. Arithmetic held a wlld saturnalian kermess; algebra cut capers. The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merry-makng. There was applause. Tolley bowed, with all his usual grace; Pongileoni bowed, even the anonymous fiddlers bowed. The audience pushed back its chairs and got up. Torrents of pent-up chatter broke loose.

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

In Gormond, the streets and walkways were naught but rude rocks pounded into the earth with hammers, on which one might expect to find the foulest of ordure and muck. The streets of Ulmgarn were paved with smooth, perfectly maintained concrete, and the walkways, too, were of concrete artfully decorated with inlaid glazed bricks in yellow, gold, and green, and both were spotless.

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

". . . AMBROSE* SAYS: ʻIT IS OF THE NATURE
OF LIGHT NOT TOHAVE BEEN CREATED In
NUMBER, WEIGHT, AND MEASURE." Therefore the
essence of goodness does not consist in limit,
species, and order.

ON THE CONTRARY, Augustine says, "THESE THREE
- - LIMIT, SPECIES, ORDER AS COMMON GOOD
THINGS ARE IN EVERYTHING GOD HAS MADE; . . .
Therefore the essence of goodness consists in
limit, species, and order."

Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas
by Thomas Aquinas. Ed. with an introd.
by Anton Pegis.

*Caps: Caps are used here for the italics
(which I donʻt have on this keyboard) of
the original.

never mind . . .

"What's wrong with her?"

"Everything!" fizzed the Nis. "This is not a proper baby, but a seal-baby. Not one thing, not the other." With its head on one side, it added more cheerfully, "Maybe she will pine, maybe she will die!"

Troll Mill Katherine Langrish

". . . (W)e believe that individuality is
the principle that differences (sic) civilized
men from savages, from the lower animals,
and makes us a nation instead of a tribe or
a herd." *

A Traveler from Altruria
by William Dean Howells

*Howells, a Socialist, is just recording, not favoring,
this point of view. And Iʻm not favoring it, either.

"Before we go, I'd like to take another look at that dead body."

A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr

Her car was there, but she wasnʻt

He said to the dispatcher, "she could
have gone out back to help Scoop and
Fi. Thatʻs where the fire is."

The Mist by Carla Neggers

Outside it was raining. He wished he had been brought to the church in the carriage when he saw his wet horse patiently waiting for him at the post. The rain might let up, he thought, and looked back into the church. The visiting preacher was still ranting about the evils of wealth while the congregation sat frozen in their seats lest they offend God by taking their eyes from the preacher. Stupid people, he thought. Ignorant, superstitious people. He would rather take the rain than listen to another word Cleavers had to say, so he tossed the raincoat over him and mounted the soggy saddle of his black mare and headed home indignantly.

Morning Ran Red by Stephen Bowman

T he light quanta have already traveled past
the point of splitting M, if you think of them as ordinary
Newtonian objects. Even so, inserting the mirror at
P always shows the wave aspect and not inserting
the mirror shows the particle aspect.

Physics of the Soul: the Quantum Book of
Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality
by Amit Goswami

To "own" something - - what does it
really mean? What does it mean to make
something "mine"?

A New Earth: Awakening to your Lifeʻs Purpose
by Eckhart Tolle

"What is good, Sandalphon?"

"That you turned red instead of pale. I am a reader of selves, Yarrow. I can see into a man within a few seconds after meeting him. And I saw that you were not ready to faint with terror, as many would have done if they had just heard my first words to you. No, you became flushed with the hot blood of aggressiveness. You were ready to deny, to argue, to fight against anything I might say.

The Lovers by Philip Jose Farmer

"Of Homer himself, nothing is known. He used
the Greek language, but it was not the classical
Attic Greek of a later era, being earlier in form
and incorporating many words from other dialects/
A lively controversy has raged for generations
among scholars on the question "Who was Homer?"
and "was there a Homer?" . . .Certain critics have
suggested that there may have been two Homers,
one the author of the Iliad, the other of the Odyssey.
Moder commentators are in general agreement with
L. A. Post who concludes that the important consideration
is: ʻWe have the Iliad and the Odyssey; their
artistic unity forbids us to suppose that they had more
than one author each . . . . . It is easier to believe in
one genius called Homer, as the Greeks did, than in two.ʻ "

Now his father's voice was thick, his throat bunged with feeling. "Don't tell me, don't bleddywell tell me what I think. Or by cripes I'll crucify you with kicks. I know what Mum thinks. So don't tell me. And if I did get married again it's none of your business. Or if I went to America itself, where be rights I should have gone years ago. Just because someone dies doesn't mean we all have to don a shroud and jump down into the grave after them. It's the living have to resurrect themselves, and not the dead."

The Run of the Country by Shane Connaughton

After the mid-1960s, as recording techniques became more sophisticated, the idea of singing in the same room with the other instruments became increasingly discouraged by most engineers, as it inevitably resulted in the bleeding of one instrument's sound into the microphones set up to capture the sound of the other instruments. Thus, the engineers lose the level of control they seek to maintain over the sound for the rest of the work, especially the mixing, of the track. To avoid such a scenario, modern day recording technique has engineers trying to isolate each sound into isolation booths, with the drums in a "live room." The players can all be in the same room, but the amplifiers and vocalist are usually in isolation booths, with glass to peer through. The ideal for many engineers is to push up a fader on a mixing console and hear only that intended instrument. But on the majority of Stones tracks, in addition to hearing Mick Jagger's intended main lead vocal (recorded once the final take is chosen from among a variety of recordings of the same song) you can also almost always hear "ghost" tracks of his guide vocal underneath the mix. On some tracks, it sounds almost as prominent as an actual vocal "take," difficult to distinguish from the backing vocals.

The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz

"More work remains to be done on
the (Phaistos) Disc, but it seems to
be in the same Semitic language as
Linear A."

The Minoan Language by Cyrus Gordon

"Figured there was nothin' for me in that town. I know I'm too . . . raw for them that's there. Figured there warn't nothing for me in any of the cities out east, them bein' all the same. So after that fight on the dock, when I knew I couldn't do nothin' more for you and I didn't want to end up in no Boston jail, no sir - which is where they was takin' all the other girls - I ducked back and lit out."

Mississippi Jack: Being an Account of the Further Waterborne Adventures of Jacky Faber, Midshipman, Fine Lady, and Lily of the West by L. A. Meyer

Stagg, all politeness forgotten, tore a tray from the hands of a servant and began stuffing the meat, potatoes, gravy, corn, tomatoes, bread, and butter into his rapidly working jaws, only stopping to wash them down with tremendous draughts of beer. The food and beer slopped on his bare chest and legs but, though he'd always been a fastidious eater, he paid no attention.

Flesh by Philip Jose Farmer

Here are four other examples of instincts/feelings.

* The terror of a young foal separated from his mother. This painful feeling is a hard-wired genetic program that is designed to keep all mammal mothers and their young bonded tightly together until the young ones are capable of living on their own. It serves the purpose of making the foal do everything in its power to reunite with its mother. Instinct? Yes. And a feeling.

Unlocking the Animal Mind: How Your Pet's Feelings Hold the Key to His Health and Happiness by Franklin D. McMillan, D.V.M.

"Despite huge increases in productivity, Americans
continue to work some of the longest hours of any
country on earth."

Bernie Sanders in his own Words
by Bernard Sanders

Then Mr. Crouchback showed immediate solicitude for Jumbo's comfort. He must not think of sleeping in a bathroom. Mr. Crouchback's sitting-room was at his disposal. Then Mr. Crouchback gave him some excellent sherry and later, at dinner, burgundy and port. He did not mention that this was the last bottle of a little store which he could never hope to replenish.

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh

"Great dramas like Hamlet and Macbeth
speak to the hearts of all of us. By the same
token they remain in our memories as myths,
year in and year out, giving us an increasingly
profound appreciation of our humanness."

The Cry for Myth by Rollo May

Within minutes they were swallowed. As they snaked past, people knocked against the hood of the car. They pounded the boot. Bared their teeth and pressed their faces against the glass. "Joy Bangla!" they shouted. "Death to Pakistan! Death to dictatorship!" Their breaths made clouds on the glass.

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

"Essentially a TULPA is an enigmatic life form
that has its origin within the mysterious depths
of the human mind,. . . . In simple terms, what
we imagine INTERNALLY, when we quite literally
put our mind to it, can manifest into full-blown
reality of an EXTERNAL* nature -- that is, into
matter.

*caps words are italics in the original

Lost Secrets of the Gods ed. by Michael Pye and
Kirsten Dalley; the essay quoted here is "Monsters
of the Stones" by Nick Redfern

Weather

Over the years, nothing has had a more profound effect on the Irish Mammy than the Irish weather. The only thing she can trust about it is that it can't be trusted. For each situation, she has a perfect phrase to sum up the national mood. Whatever her origins, history or influences, the Irish Mammy is very much a figure of the present---and now we need her more than ever.

(the following are depicted as markings on a barometer:)

They said there'd be rain all right.

It's that 'wetting' rain.

I don't mind the heat. It's the humidity I can't stand.

For goodness' sake close that door and keep in whatever heat there is.

Don't. STIR. OUT. Are you listening to me now?

I went out later and the clothes were dry.

Be great if we had a drop of rain.

Can't you bring your coat anyway? If you're too warm you can take it off.

Isn't It Well for Ye? The Book of Irish Mammies by Colm O'Regan

(>348 artturnerjr:, how nice to find this one here; I'd always wondered about and, Luddite-like, deplored that separation between musicians in the studio and now thanks to you I know the reason for it.)

For me, this doll "really" existed, but the existence was purely affective. When, for instance, I forgot to cover her more warmly toward evening, I dropped the things I was doing and rushed to her, examining her, rubbing her to restore warmth. Sometimes my little sister observed, "If you've forgotten to cover her, what of it? You know perfectly well she isn't alive and doesn't feel anything!" I was stupefied by her remark, but it did not alter the actuality of my concern. Often this servitude weighed heavily and I should have liked to become indifferent to Riquette and occupy myself no more with her. But this did not happen. Just the same I did not believe that she was really alive, since I never gave her anything to eat.

Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl

>358 bluepiano:

Glad you liked that. For my money, modern engineers have gotten a little too anal retentive about separation; I like old records like The Doors' "Soul Kitchen" where, if you listen closely in the intro, you can hear the notes from the bass guitar rattling the snares on the drummer's snare drum - gives you a real sense of "being there" as you listen:

https://youtu.be/kLbfviLC09k?list=PLe52M8z8EbA9biJazhITLUaFEWXriz7Re

Then, according to our mood, we would either settle down or else get more boisterous. Mother would reach out with her tentacles and hold us down and spank us. If that did no good, she would threaten us with the olfway. That did the trick. That is, until she used him too many times. After a while, we got so we didn't believe there was an olfway. Mother, we thought, was creating a not-so-story. We should have known better, however, for Mother loathed not-so-stories.

Strange Relations by Philip Jose Farmer
(from the short story "Daughter")

"Hey!" she said, whirling around to face me. "Don't touch me!" She yanked her arm away, but I yanked right back. And I was stronger.

"Let me come with you," I whispered urgently. I didn't know where she was going, but
she was the best hope I had. Hope of what, I wasn't sure, but I would figure that out later.
"I promise - I'll do whatever you want. I swear I won't get you in trouble. But I'm alone here, and I have no idea what I'm doing."

She bit her lip. The thing is, I could tell she was as curious about me as I was about her. I could tell part of her wanted to relent.

But then we heard that clanging noise again. This time it was louder.

"You seem like a nice person," Indigo hissed. "And I love rats. But get your fucking hands off me and get the hell away from me. The best thing you can do right now is get your ass back to wherever it is you came from and hope you never wind up in this sorry place again."

" I don't know how to go home," I said. But I let her elbow go. This wasn't getting me anywhere.

"It looks like you've got problems, too, then." Indigo folded her arms across her chest, planting her stocky body firmly in place. "See ya," she said.

Honestly, I was starting to think this girl was kind of an asshole. But if she wasn't going to help me, I couldn't think of any good way to force her. All I could do was keep following the road and hope it led me somewhere better than this.

So I walked away, back to the famous road paved with yellow ...

Dorothy must Die by Danielle Paige

The column was like some curious khaki-colored carpet, hiding the road as far as you could see. In Fuselli's company the men were shifting their weight from one foot to the other, muttering, "What the hell a' they waiting for now?" Bill Grey, next to Fuselli in the ranks, stood bent double so as to take the weight of his pack off his shoulders. They were at a cross-roads on fairly high ground so that they could see the long sheds and barracks of the camp stretching away in every direction, in rows and rows broken now and then by a grey drlll field. In front of them the column stretched to the last bend in the road, where it disappeared on a hill among mustard-yellow suburban houses.

Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

When {Robert} Moses began to interest himself in the new public-works domain of housing in the late 1930s, an ill wind blew for New York's most vulnerable tenants. The man who would play a central role in orchestrating slum clearance and housing development was disdainful of working people, contemptuous toward blacks, and prone to red-baiting critics. As postwar tenant leader Jane Benedict summed up Moses' dual legacy as planning wizard and political knave, "Now he's a saint. I assure you he was a son of a bitch when I knew him."

When Tenants Claimed the City: the Struggle for Citizenship in New York Housing by Roberta Gold

Most critically, Moses, who never learned to drive and was chauffeured in an air-conditioned Packard limousine, ignored the emerging problem of gridlock.
By making it easier for people to drive and to live in suburbs that could be reached by cars, he foredoomed the city to paralysis. He enabled the suburbanization of Long Island, where mass-produced, car-based suburbs like Levittown, built just off his Wantagh State Parkway, ate up villages and farmland.
The Triborough Bridge was meant to solve New York's traffic problems; instead, congestion on all the city's other bridges actually increased in the months after it was built.
Moses's bridges and city-spanning highways provided the first demonstration of the theory of induced traffic: build more highways, and they will fill up, almost instantly.

Strap Hanger by Taras Grescoe

>365 Brazen: Whoa! Two Robert Moses sightings in a row!

In the 1690s Hereditary Princess Sophia Dorothea of Hanover relied entirely on her devoted lady-in-waiting, Eleonore de Knesebeck, to facilitate her love affair with the Swedish count Philip von Konigsmark. Knesebeck wrote many of Sophia Dorothea's love letters to the count in her own hand and received the count's letters addressed to her. That way, if they were intercepted, it would look as if the count and Eleonore had been having the affair. When Konigsmark was bold enough to venture into Sophia Dorothea's rooms in the palace, Eleonore de Knesebeck waited by a little door leading from the palace to the garden and opened it when she heard him whistling a tune called "The Spanish Follies." She then led him up a hidden staircase directly to the princess's bedchamber.

Sex With the Queen by Eleanor Herman

Fun fact: The author is descended from (and named after) Eleanor of Aquitaine, her grandmother 28 times removed.

When you touch the present moment, you
touch the past and the future. When you touch
time, you touch space. When you touch space,
you touch time. When you touch the lemon tree
in early spring, you touch all the lemons that
will be there in three or four months.

Thich Naht Hanh: Essential Writings
ed. by Robert Ellsberg with an introd.
by Sister Anabel Laity

HAN - Good Lando, thou didst turn thy back on me,
But thou shalt have a chance to earn thy due
Since Luke and Chewie tell me of thy shame.
Chewbacca, lift me down that I may save
Him from a thousand Years of pain.
LUKE - Brave Han
Attempts to rescue Lando, but the gun
From on the barge doth block his progress. Fie!
No rest from trouble have we here-these foes
Will not let us escape without a fight.
They do intend to block us all the way-
Then to the barge, to aid the rescue. Fly!
-Luke jumps onto Jabba's barge.
HAN - Pray, grasp the staff!
LANDO - I almost have it!
CHEWBAC - Auugh!
LANDO - Alack! The sarlacc's tentacle wraps 'round
My leg. I fear this is the end! O give
Me strength to face my death well.
HAN - Be thou still,
And Chewie, hand the blaster unto me.
LANDO - A blaster in the hands of one who's blind?
Methinks I may do better in the pit.
Good Han, think on the defects of thine eyes!
HAN - My sight is much improv'd: my aim is true!

The Jedi Doth Return by Ian Doescher

FIRST NIGHT

You came into my life
with grace, giving me time
to want all of you. That
first night I couldn't say
whether your passion or
your gentleness moved me
more, the way we took each
other or how we talked
till dawn, our brief sleep a
ceremonial act
in the strangeness of love.

- julia h. ackerman

Passionate Hearts edited by Wendy Maltz

"If there is an overstretch in certain
muscles, the centre of gravity also shifts.
Perhaps through insensitivity, you are not
aware that you are doing this. Insensitivity
means that part of the body is dull - - that
it has no awareness - - and this is the part
where pain will develop."

The Tree of Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar

The self-willed man does not believe and does not meet. He does not know solidarity of connexion, but only the feverish world outside and his feverish desire to use it. Use needs only to be given an ancient name, and it companies with the gods. When this man says Thou, he means 'O my ability to use,' and what he terms his destiny is only the equipping and sanctioning of his ability to use. He has in truth no destiny, but only a being that is defined by things and instincts, which he fulfils with the feeling of sovereignty - that is, the arbitrariness of self-will. He has no grand will, only self-will, which he passes off as real will. He is wholly incapable of sacrifice, even though he may have the word on his lips; you know him by the fact that the word never becomes concrete.

I and Thou by Martin Buber

A bit of a cheat here: this is from page 42 of the book I'm teaching from and writing, rather than what I'm reading for pleasure:

Because many of our sensors and circuits will have a small changing signal with a large DC
offset, the AC definition is usually the more useful one for us, and that is what PteroDAQ re-
ports. You can compute the AC+DC RMS voltage, if needed, as VAC+DC = 􏶜V 2 + V 2 . DC RMS
The DC and RMS values can be used to measure steady-state signals (either DC or AC) with higher precision than single samples. In some of the places where an AC voltmeter is called for in the labs, PteroDAQ can be substituted—the crucial questions are whether the voltages are in a range suitable for the analog-to-digital conversion and whether the aliasing due to PteroDAQ’s sampling causes high frequency signals to be misinterpreted.

Applied Electronics for Bioengineers https://leanpub.com/applied_electronics_for_bioengineers
by Kevin Karplus

3496. What information is contained in a
CONVECTIVE SIGMET?

A- Tornadoes, embedded thunderstorms, and hail 3/4
inch or greater in diameter.
B- Severe icing, severe turbulence, or widespread dust
storms lowering visibility to less than 3 miles.
C- Surface winds greater than 40 knots or
thunderstorms equal to or greater than video integrator
processor (VIP) level 4.

3497. SIGMET's are issued as a warning of weather
conditions hazardous to which aircraft?

A- Small aircraft only.
B- Large aircraft only.
C- All aircraft.

3498. Which in-flight advisory would contain
information on severe icing?

A- Convective SIGMET.
B- SIPMET.
C- AIRMET.

3499. AIRMET's are issued as a warning of weather
conditions particularly hazardous to which aircraft?

A- Small single-engine aircraft.
B- Large multiengine aircraft.
C- All aircraft.

Recreational Pilot and Private Pilot Written Test Book 1993 FAA

What did Darwin do to dead owls?

He ate them, though only once.

From Thumbprint In the Clay by Luci Shaw:

"Here's my own take, my personal attempt to define my perception of the beautiful: it's an echo of the true, the angle of light on an object that reveals it is, intrinsically, in a kind of naked integrity."

Firstly he placed a plate of popcorn kernels in front of the radar set and was amazed to see them explode all around him within a minute. (incidentally, popcorn would later become the world's favourite microwaved food.) He then experimented with other foods, including an egg that was placed in a tea kettle. It must have been an extraordinary moment when the egg suddenly exploded into the face of a colleague who was peering in to take a closer look. Percy Spencer then built the world's first microwave oven by placing a high-density electromagnetic field generator into an enclosed metal box, which enabled safer and more controlled experiments, and his team observed the effects it had on various foods whilst monitoring the temperatures and cooking times. He realized the consequences of his accidental discovery and Raytheon filed for a patent on 8 October 1945 for a 'microwave cooking oven' that would be called a Radarange.

They Laughed at Galileo by Albert Jack

Like me, Sonny had missed a lot of school during a childhood illness. In her case, a bout of hepatitis when she was ten years old had kept her home for three months. She had spent her invalid days watching midday movies and had developed a taste for musical extravaganzas.

Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks

A soccer ball rolls in a leisurely manner across the gravel, away from Britt-Marie's car and towards what Britt-Marie assumes must be the recreation center. After a moment there's a disconcerting thumping noise. Determined not to be distracted from the tasks at hand, she gets out a list from her handbag. At the top it says, "Drive to Borg." She ticks that point. The next item on the list is, "Pick up key from post office."

Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman

To Dance with Ugly People by Lorene Stunson Hill

I dragged my feet, trembling. I watched him unsteadily make his way over to a discarded mattress lying in a darkened corner. I couldn't believe it was me he was dragging! It felt like a bad dream! Oh GOD, how did I get
here? What would Daddy say? I mentally called out to Big Mama for help! The closer to the mattress we got, the
harder I fought. I lashed out at him with clenched fists, scratching his face, and tried to kick him. My heart was
pounding so hard I could even feel it in my fingertips. He yanked me to him and then slammed me onto the
mattress, on my back, so hard the wind rushed out of my lungs.

I made myself go on, overcoming the impulse to turn back, but it got stronger and stronger, as if a part of me was firmly opposed to the idea of leaving the hotel. I have to admit that when I reached the end of the corridor and saw the the light was not coming from a door, but from a vast glass dome which was totally transparent, the blue of the sky shining through, I experienced no sense of disappointment, only relief.

At first I was blinded by the sudden brightness, but gradually I was able to look up and gaze steadily beyond the iron framework into the towering perspective towards the infinite, without encountering any obstacle other than the occasional wisp of white cloud. After spending so long in enclosed places, with restricted lines of vision, the immensity of the void up above quite dazed me. Perhaps I wouldn't have dared to stare so long into that infinity, that openness, giving myself up to it and letting myself be entranced as if inebriated or dizzy, if I hadn't been conscious of the four solid walls which formed a secure barrier around me. My position as a prisoner hadn't altered, for the external world was merely showing me its most abstract and inaccessible aspect, as though emphasising the distance that now separated me from it, and I could enjoy it as a harmless, detached realm of the imagination.

Eventually, tired of straining my eyes, I looked down again, and saw a sort of greenhouse, an enormous room in which plants and trees thankfully, avidly welcomed the shower of light which cascaded from the dome.

The Dual Realm, Paola Capriolo

We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyotem the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth.

Desert Solitude: A Season in the Wilderness

Lorsque la bûche siffle et chante, si le soir
Calme, dans le fauteuil je la voyais s'asseoir,
Si, par une nuit bleue et froide de décembre,
Je la trouvais tapie en un coin de ma chambre,
Grave, et venant du fond de son lit éternel
Couver l'enfant grandi de son oeil maternel,
Que pourrais-je répondre à cette âme pieuse,
Voyant tomber des pleurs de sa paupière creuse?

- Charles Baudelaire

Modern French Poetry: a bilingual anthology

"Mother sat beside my bed; she had taken up
(a book) Francois le Champi,* the reddish cover
and the incompressible title of which used to have a
distinct personality and a mysterious attraction
for me. I had not yet read any real novels.

/
"Maman sʻassit a coteʻ de mon lit; elle avait
pris "Francois le Champi" aʻ qui sa couverture
rougeatre et son titre incomprehensible, donnaient
pour moi une personaliteʻ distincte et un attrait
mysterieux. Je nʻavais jamais lu encore de vrais romans.

"Aʻ la Recherche du Temps Perdu"
by Marcel Proust

*Francois le Champi: a novel (Proust implies)
by George Sand. (Wikipedia says it is a play.)

Sheridan took the brigade to Booneville, Mississippi, to set up camp and guard the front of the Federal army, which was bivouacked twenty miles to the north at Corinth. There he immediately cultivated his old habit of making maps of his surroundings. A few weeks later his leadership and his maps were put to the first supreme test. On the morning of July 1, with virtually no warning, he found himself under attack by a force of Confederate cavalry that outnumbered his 800 troopers by six to one.

The Guns of Cedar Creek by Thomas A. Lewis

The Roosters rehearsed more than we played. Even though we did a gig every now and then, mostly in upstairs rooms in pubs, it was more about the excitement of meeting like-minded blues people. Virtually nobody in Ripley had any interest in the blues. Pop was the order of the day, with the current craze being the Mersey sound. The Beatles were just starting to be popular, and once a week a radio show called Pop Go the Beatles came on, which consisted entirely of them playing there own songs and covers of other people's. They were taking off really quickly, and everybody wanted to be like them. It was the beginnings of Beatlemania. All over the country people were dressing like them, playing like them, sounding like them, and looking like them. I thought it was despicable, probably because it showed how sheeplike people were, and how ready they were to elevate these players to the status of gods, when most of the artists I admired had died unheard of, sometimes penniless and alone. It also made it look like what we were trying to do was already a lost cause.

Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton

" Thus as they passed,
The day with cloudes was sudden overcast,
And angry Jove a hideous storme of raine
Did poure . . . . ." (orthography slightly revised)

The Faerie Queen; ed. by Thomas P. Roche, Jr.
by Edmund Spenser

As critic John Leland wrote in Spin: "The digital sampling device has changed not only the sound of pop music, but also the mythology. It has done what punk rock threatened to do: made everybody into a potential musician, bridged the gap between performer and audience."

- Siva Vaidhyanathan

Censoring Culture - ed. by Robert Atkins

A confined triangle, perhaps fifty miles
its greatest length and thirty its greatest
breadth; two elevated rocky barriers,
meeting at an angle; three prominent
mountains commanding the plain: Parnes,
Pentelicus, and Hymettus; an unsatisfactory
soil, some streams, not always full; - - such
is about the report which the agent of a
London company would have made of Attica.

"Site of a University" by John Henry Newman*
included in Essays English and American p. 42
series: Harvard Classics

*The co-hero of Ulysses, "Stephen Dedalus" calls
Newman the greatest English prose writer. Whether
this was Joyceʻs own opinion, I donʻt know. He
thought the Victorian era, in general, was very
debased in its prose.

I was pretty scared, so I listened to those instructions very carefully. The scene on the ice was crazy. I was trying to keep an eye on all of the fights around me when I saw someone coming up on us at a run. I knew what I was supposed to do, and I didn't hesitate. I raised my stick and cracked him on the head. Down he went. As he crumpled on the ice, I looked down and noticed something I hadn't a moment earlier: a yellow stripe on his pants. In Canada, that means only one thing. He wasn't a player. He wasn't a referee. He wasn't even a fan. He was RCMP, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I had just clubbed a Mountie. I wish he had identified himself before charging at me. It would have saved me a lot of worrying, and him a lump on his head. My teammate grabbed me and we got out of there. I was sure they'd come after me for that and I'd land in jail, but days passed and thankfully no one knocked on our door.

Mr Hockey - Gordie Howe

Mr. Darcy posted a Link: My Immense Family Estate

Elizabeth upgraded her thoughts on Mr. Darcy

Elizabeth wrote on Mr Darcy's Wall.
"I'm sorry I was prejudiced."

Mr Darcy wrote on Elizabeth's Wall.
"I'm sorry I was proud."

from Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs onto Facebook

42 - Zeuxisgelächter - laughter so prolonged and intense it causes physical pain.

Although William M. Thackeray claimed that the agony of laughter was "impossible to describe in words,"* the C16th French physician Laurent Joubert came close, in his canonical 'Treatise on Laughter'

"Everyone can clearly see, with laughter. suddenly the
face moves, the mouth enlarges, the eyes sparkle and
water, the checks blush, and the chest shakes, we cannot
speak, and when this goes on for a while, the veins of
the neck bulge, the arms wave, and the legs stamp. the gut
spasms painfully: we cough, perspire, piss and shit
ourselves through laughter, and sometimes we even
pass out."**

* W. M. Thackeray, Men's Wives (D. Appleton, 1852.), 137
** Laurent Joubert, Traite du Ris (Nicolas Chesneau, 1579), 42

Schottenfreude - Ben Schott

From Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord by Louis de Bernières
That night Anica and Dionisio made love three times with ferocious abandon, their bodies incandescent with lust, as though their brush with death had revealed to them the tenuousness of their hold on life and on each other. From that day forward Anica, who was intuitive about such things, began to think of her lover as a man of preternatural force, but she was also a little afraid, as if she knew that he had a destiny.

SHARING INFORMATION

Thinking like a concierge also means sharing information. Being the "eyes and ears" of the hotel, the concierge should pass along information to all departments, especially the executive departments, regarding any VIP's in the hotel.

Alexander Zubak of the Sheraton at Fisherman's Wharf once spotted a famous cellist but felt certain that no one else was aware of the gentleman's identity. He was able to inform his general manager in time to avoid his having to deal with the embarrassment of appearing uninformed.

A good concierge has the ear of top management and is able to call to their attention things that which may require action when it may be inappropriate for another employee to do so.

Ultimate Service - Holly Stiel/Delta Collins

"Mason stared for a moment at the ditch
which had already begun to collect drainage
water, and said, "All right. wait here", and
walked back to his car, took a flashlight from
the glove compartment, climbed over the
barbed-wire fence, and started searching through
the wet grass, playing the beam of his flashlight
around in circles."

The Case of the Postponed Murder
by Erle Stanley Gardner
(The Original Courtroom Novels)

HOTEL RIEN PLUS
222, rue Simon
le Simple

This hotel does not accept guests. They advertise, accept reservations, send confirmations and solicit advance payment (accepted by check or money order only), but no one has actually ever managed to stayed(sic) there in its entire seventy-five-year history. It's worth making a reservation there just to see the Bureau de Déception. But be warned: those who have been foolish enough to make a deposit have never been successful in getting a refund.

Paris out of hand - Karen Elizabeth Gordon

She laughed suddenly and sharply and went halfway through the door, then turned her head to say coolly: "You're as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?"

"Sure."

"You can call me Vivian."

"Thanks, Mrs. Regan."

"Oh, go to hell, Marlowe." She went on out and didn't look back.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

(PS I know we're supposed to post a paragraph, but the dialogue here is better :))

Is there an elaborate magical dialogue between the badger and its genes, along the lines of "You're our bearer: if you're taken out, it's all up for us. So put up a good show, won't you, for our sakes?"""Oh, all right then: you're the boss"? That's the sort of conversation that much of biology tends tacitly to assume.

I prefer a simpler and less fashionable version, which admits that a badger has a real sense of self, and real pleasures that it judges as outweighing its pains. Badgers are philosophers. They have an idea of the Good Life, which presumes there is a self that can lead that life. This is a self that doesn't want to lose the neurological joys of nuzzling cubs, or the smell of wild garlic, or the smack of earthworms against the tongue. Insist if you like that all these things are the payment given by the genes for the mercenary services in their defense of the strong-jawed phenotype. That's fine. Your insistence doesn't dispose of the self, or the Goodness of the Life that self leads.

Being a Beast - Charles Foster

The catch was poor, the banter jovial, until sunrise, when the alcohol leveled and the talk turned gloomy. Cosey, looking at some lively worms in the belly of a catfish, said, "If you kill the predators, the weak will eat you alive."

Love by Toni Morrison

From The Golem and the Jinni
He carried the string-wrapped package back across the Bowery, thinking. It would be difficult, living with someone who sensed one's desires. If he wasn't careful, he'd fall to chasing his own mind, trapped in the maddening game of don't think about that. He'd have to be completely honest and unabashed, and hid nothing. It wouldn't come easy. But any misplaced courtesy would do her a disservice. The larger world would not be so accommodating.

No innovations or developments were to interfere with the stucco houses, gabled and beamed wood. or the crooked cobblestone lanes that passed for streets. Roads were too narrow for cars, so people had to leave them outside the town gate.

It was a custom of mine not to memorize any names. I do not remember the name of that town. I did not want to move as a tourist. I was not a tourist. I lived there. I did not carry a map or a dictionary or a notebook or a camera. Like all the other people living in the area, I had come to Bilbert on a Sunday. dressed in Sunday clothes, to saunter through the medieval lanes. No one was in a hurry that day. We all walked slowly and greeted each other politely when we passed. I have christened the town Bilbert: we were all having a Sunday outing in Bilbert.

Rose Garden by Kristiana Gunnars

From The Last Runaway
On one corner of Public Square was the town hotel. For such a small town, it was surprisingly grand: a long, two-story building with a double balcony running all the way along its front on both floors, held up by several pairs of white columns. "Wadsworth Hotel," Belle remarked. "Only place in town to get a drink - not that you need to know that. You Quakers don't touch alcohol, do you?"

You don't know what heat is until you cross the border from Texas to Louisiana in the summer. You can't come up with words that catch it. Trees give up. Turtles cook in their shells. Describe that if you know how.

Home by Toni Morrison

From 84 Charing Cross Road
I just talked to your mother, she says you don't think the show will run another month and she says you took two dozen pairs of nylons over there, so do me a favor. As soon as the closing notice goes uyp take four pairs of nylons around to the bookshop for me, give them to Frank Doel, tell him they're for the three girls and Nora (his wife).

PETER ALTENBERG (Austria, 1859-1919)

Theater Evening

She couldn't take the poodle with her into the theater.
So the poodle stayed with me in the cafe and we awaited the mistress.
He stationed himself so as to keep an eye on the entrance, and I found this very expedient, if a bit excessive, since, honestly, it was only half past seven in the evening and we had to wait till a quarter past eleven.
We sat there and waited.
Every carriage that rattled by awakened hope in him, and every time I said to him: "It's not possible, it can't be her yet, be reasonable, it's just not possible!"
Sometimes I said to him: "Our beautiful, kind-hearted mistress-!"
He was positively sick with longing, twisted his head in my direction: "is she coming or isn't she?!"

At one point he abandoned his guard post, came close to me, lay his paw on my knee and I kissed him.
As if he'd said to me: "Go ahead, tell me the truth, I can take anything!"

At ten o'clock he began to whine.
So I said to him: "Listen pal, don't you think I'm antsy You've got to control yourself!"
But he didn't put much stock in control and whined.

Then he started softly weeping.
"Is she coming or isn't she?! "
"She's coming, she's coming-.'
Then he lay himself perfectly flat on the floor and I sat there rather stooped over in my chair.
He wasn't whining any more, just stared at the entrance while I stared ahead of me.

It was a quarter to twelve.
She came at last. With her sweet, soft, sliding steps, she came quietly and collected, greeted us in her mild manner.

Short - Edited by Alan Ziegler

It was languid curiosity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers’ Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud’s were shewn, and he had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it. Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were present—Landru, Dr. Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey, endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de Rais and Marquis de Sade—but there were other things which had made him breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the closing bell. The man who had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary mountebank. There was imagination—even a kind of diseased genius—in some of this stuff.

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions by H.P. Lovecraft et al. (from the title short story ("The Horror in the Museum", credited to Hazel Heald but in fact ghostwritten by Lovecraft; online here: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hm.aspx))

PS This is actually from page 43 of the book - page 42 is the final page of the story "Winged Death", and I refrained from posting a paragraph from that in order not to spoil it for anyone here who might choose to read it.

DOROTHY: So tell me, Geraldo. Why did you write the book?

BLANCHE: Why, Dorothy, the answer to that question is obvious. He
wanted the world to know what a charming ... open ... sensitive ...
(breathing heavily) sensual man he ...

SOPHIA: Balderdash. He wanted to brag about all the girls he bonged.

ROSE: Bonged? I don't remember reading that ... but you know, I once
knew a man named Sven Strudelbonger. Everyone called him Bong for
short. Partly because of his name, but mostly because he had a bell in front
of his shop, and every time a pretty woman walked by, Sven would bong
the bell. Everyone made comments about his large bonger, but I dont know
why. I thought the bell was rather small. It was only this big, but then you
know ...

DOROTHY: Rose!

I wish I'd said that - Linda McCallister

But to come to my subject. Why is the act of generation--natural, necessary, and just as it is--never spoken of without a blush? We say boldly enough: 'Kill, rob, betray'; but this other we whisper under our breath. Do we mean that the less energy we spend on it in talk, the more we'll have for thinking about it? Certainly, the words least often spoken are the best and most widely known. And the sex that practices it most mentions it least. Is it not the same with books, which sell faster for being supressed?

I have not been so long discharged from the army of Venus that I can't recollect her force and worth. There still remains a spark of the fire and a twitch of the fever. And I'll take Aristotle at his word when he says that bashfulness is an ornament of youth, but a reproach in old age.

The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne, translated/edited by Lowenthal.

A. J. Muste, the mid-twentieth century leader of
the peace movement in America who inspired
millions of people. said, :"There is no way to peace,
peace is the way." This means that we can realize
peace right in the present moment with our look,
our smile, our words, and our actions. Peace work
is not a means. Each step we make should be peace.
Each step we make should be joy. Each step we
make should be happiness. If we are determined we
can do it. We don't need the future. We can smile
and relax. Everything we want is right here in theʻ
present moment."

Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hahn

Right now I am sitting in a bunker on a radio relay station about 15 miles inland from Chu Lai in the middle of two NVA regiments which are scattered in and around the surrounding area. I'm up here with about 15 other Rangers on the highest hill in I Corps area maintaining radio contact with our teams on the other side of these mountains. It's a bit of a hairy proposition as the hill is expected to be overrun soon.

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

42 - Beds and Sleep

W.C.Fields's cure for insomnia was "Get plenty of sleep."

When John Denver lost his temper with his then wife, Annie (made famous in Annie's Song), he sawed their bed in half.

Peter Stringfellow, the nightclub owner, shared a single bed with his three younger brothers when he was growing up.

More than 600,000 Americans each year are injured on beds and chairs.

The shortest recorded time taken by one person to make a bed is 28.2 seconds by Wendy Wall of Sydney, Australia in 1978; the record time for two people to make a bed is 14 seconds by Sister Sharon Stringer and Nurse Michelle Benkel at London's Royal Masonic Hospital at the launch of the 1994 edition of The Guinness Book of Records.

George Burns once said: "You have to have something to get you out of bed. I can't do anything in bed anyway."

The United States has many sleepy towns: Sleepy Eye (Minnesota), Sleepy Creek (Oregon), Sleeping Beauty Peak (Arizona), Sleepers Bend (California)

According to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Sleeping is no mean art. For its sake one must stay awake all day'

Max Kauffmann reckoned that "the amount of sleep required by the average person is about five minutes more", while Fran Lebowitz decided: "Sleep is death without the responsibility."

This,That and the Other - Mitchell Symons

The Diva Runs Out of Thyme by Krista Davis

I stormed down the hall to face Simon, rapped on the door, but didn't wait for permission to enter.
"Simon!" I charged into an empty room.
Almost empty.

Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides

Declaring Manila an "open city," the outgunned Americans systematically withdrew from their positions around the capital and funneled down into the Bataan Peninsula to prepare for the onslaught of Homma's Fourteenth Imperial Army. A few days before Christmas, Homma's troops landed at Lingayen Gulf and made their way south toward Manila, many thousands of them on bicycles. Encountering only weak and erratic resistance, Homma stormed into the undefended capital to find that the bulk of MacArthur's forces were already deeply entrenched on Bataan, which, with its roadless jungles and steep volcanic headlands jutting out into Manila Bay, was perfectly suited for a protracted defensive war.

I am outside sitting on the porch waiting for Cherylanne. We are going to the movies, and whenever we do she makes a big fuss over herself, takes forever getting ready. Anyone could be there: The lifeguard. Rock Hudson. A talent scout looking for someone exactly like Cherylanne, driving all around the world in his white Cadillac car until he finds just her. You might as well be prepared, is how Cherylanne feels. She'll take a double shower, wear her Tigress perfume fro the bottle with the fake-fur top.

-- Durable Goods by Elizabeth Berg

Now his aunt had dropped a motive, and no matter that he couldn't picture Frank as a murderer, it was still there, pointing at Dominic. The man was running a very expensive mayoral campaign, of course he needed money. He dreamed of building canals throughout downtown, creating a Venice of the southwest with Rio Grande water. He was vain and ambitious and he wanted, more than anything, the power to run the city.

-- Zia Summer by Rudolfo Anaya

Shoes for both sexes were exclusively for outdoor wear. This was deduced from various buildings in Knossos where the steps leading up to them were very worn, but this damage stopped abruptly at the door. Courtiers and royalty are invariably portrayed barefoot, whereas soldiers and hunters are more usually shown wearing leather sandals or calf-length boots.

A History of Fashion by J. Anderson Black and Madge Garland

Also, irregular forms do not correlate with any kind of meaning, Many verbs are similar in meaning but have completely different past-tense forms.

For example, hit, strike, and slap all refer to hitting.
Hit has an irregular verb that does not change in the past tense: Today we hit golf balls; Yesterday we hit golf balls. Strike is an irregular verb that changes its vowel, yielding struck, And slap is a regular verb, with past tense slapped.

Not only are there verbs with similar meanings and different past-tense forms, there are verbs with different meanings and the same past-tense forms. English has a class of verbs linguists call light verbs, such as come, go, do, take, have, set, get, put, and stand.

Compared to ordinary verbs they are less filling; a light verb doesn't have a meaning that stays with it, but takes on dozens of meanings, especially in combination with particles such as in, out, up, off, over and around.

come (move to here), come around (agree), come into (inherit), come (reach orgasm), come off as (appear). come out (divulge sexuality), come to (awaken)

Words and Rules - Steven Pinker

Right now I am sitting in a bunker on a radio relay station about 15 miles inland from Chu Lai in the middle of two NVA regiments which are scattered in and around the surrounding area. I'm up here with about 15 other Rangers on the highest hill in I Corps area maintaining radio contact with our teams on the other side of these mountains. It's a bit of a hairy proposition as the hill is expected to be overrun soon.

-- Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

"She bowed to her brother"

The story of how she bowed to her brother.
Who has whom as his.
Did she bow to her brother. When she saw him.
Any long story. Of how she bowed to her brother.
Sometimes not.
She bowed to her brother. Accidentally. When she saw him.
Often as well. As not.
She did not. Bow to her brother. When she. Saw him.
This could happen. Without. Him.
Everybody finds in it a sentence that pleases them.
This is the story included in. How she bowed to her brother.
Could another brother have a grand daughter.
No. But. He could have a grandson.
This has nothing to do with the other brother of whom it is said that we read she bowed to her brother.
There could he a union between reading and learning.
And now everybody. Reads. She bowed. To her brother.

Gertrude Stein (1934) - From "Poetry speaks"

"Yes, Mr. Chairman, there are some things that I want to say," said George. He had nowhere to rest his hands: he pulled on his waistcoat. But he was not resentful and defensive, as he had been with Eden the Friday night before. Four out of these five were against him: always ready to scent enemies, he must have known. Yet, now it had come to the hour, his voice was clear, masterful, and strong.

-- George Passant by C.P. Snow

Colchuck Balanced Rock 8200' ...

The Scoop 5.11c (.10 c2)

Length: 280m
Rack: Wires, RP's, doubles from tips to #2, single #3,
triples #.5, #.75, 60m rope

The Scoop's signature corner is one of the best pure crack pitches in the range. It's the "big brother" of the long corner on the nearby West Face, featuring sustained moves and bomber protection. Pitches 4 and 5 have excellent 5.10 climbing on great rock with memorable stemming, knobs, and finger cracks. P2 and P4 can drip for a few days after rain, but there is generally great pro through the persistently wet sections. Begin amid gray slabs to the right of where a series of overhangs lean out above the wall, -60m above the talus. This is left of a large white rock scar. An excellent 5.10 option (Nectar) follows cracks right of P3-P5.

P1: 55m 5.10a
Make a steep move off the ground leading to right-angling ramps and a solitary pine. A short v-slot move then leads right and up to a ledge.
P2: 50m 5.10a
Follow the crack system above the ledge toward a few pine trees before stepping left on face moves around an arete onto flakes, and up into a crack leading to a major terrace dubbed "launch ledge" where trees exist to belay from.
P3: 45m 5.11c
From the left end of the ledge climb up a short crack into the immaculate scooped corner with sustained climbing. The belay above this pitch has a slung chockstone and takes medium cams.
P4: 40m 5.10b
Step down and left, then up into a thin stemming crux. The crack steepens to perfect hands amid knobs in a corner. The upper part of this pitch can be wet in early season, but it is easily aided. Belay on the left after turning a small roof.
P5: 50m 5.10a
Move up from the belay and span across on knobs, stepping left around a second large roof and jamming up the 5.9 corner to flatter ground.
P6+ 5.6: Follow corners and short cracks up blockier terrain before padding up to the summit.

FA: Evan Cabodi, Matt Clifton, Stewart Mathiesen 2009

VAR: The Nectar ( P3-P5 )
From the base of P3, (the "Scoop" pitch) step right along a ledge and into a splitter hand and fist crack (5.10+). This leads up and arcs leftward, parallel to the Scoop, and ends on the same belay ledge as the normal P3. Two more pitches on the right (flared chimney, leaning corner) provide an independent finish in the 5.10 range.

FA: Tom Ramier, Abe Traven 2010

Cascades Rock - Blake Herrington

>419 Brazen:

I love Gertrude Stein. There's something about her poetry that I find totally mesmerizing.

Quack, (n), a veterinarian specializing in sick ducks.

Quad-rup-lets, (n.pl), four crying out loud.

Quar-an-tine, (n), for the person who has everything.

Quar-ter, (n), a dollar with all the taxes taken out.

Quar-tet, (n), four people who think the other three sing off-key.

Quartz, (n), "two pintz." - HGH

Quay, (n), a device that opens a river bank.

Queen bee, (n) , the power behind the drone.

Queens, (n.pl), the sport of kings.

Quest, (n), "Love is the quest, marriage the conquest, divorce the inquest." - ANON

Ques-tion, (n), a whys remark.

Ques-tion-a-ble, (adj), the answer to the question, "Is there a word containing all the vowels?"

Quip, (n), a mini ha-ha.

The Consolidated Wagster's Unexpurgated Dictionary of Humor and Wit - H. Gordon Havens editor

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, "Not upon us, oh King, not upon us!" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me, but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow. Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost him, but he did stand there and bend over me once at least.

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492)
(from the short story "The Mask")

... When I was very young my mother gave me the information that while boys' shirt buttons were on the right and the buttonholes on the left, it was the other way around with girls' shirts. So I knew which side of Sylvia McIntosh I wanted to sit on when it came to classroom desks. Every once in a while she would lean a certain way and a quick eye could see between the buttons, and there it was, her brassiere! Then at night, while you were supposed to be in bed reading three chapters of Canyon Passage by Ernest Haycox, you could picture using your boy fingers to undo, say, one of those buttons.

One thing I knew was that girls did not imagine using their girl fingers to undo our buttons, or zippers. This was the main rule of human society, or at least that is what I told my pal Willy - guys are always trying to get girls to give it to them, and girls were always trying to stop guys from getting it. This would even carry on into marriage, with some accommodations.

Wendy would usually let my hand rest on her little breast for just a short while before picking it up and putting it aside. Sometimes I would kiss her, in an attempt to distract her from this action, but despite my hopes, she would remove my hand and then breathe into my ear - a mixed message if I ever received one.

Pinboy by George Bowering

There was another, humbler reason for the lack of interest in the big picture: Scientists simply didn't have the requisite intellectual energy. The vast majority of scientists have never been more than journeymen prospectors. That is even more the case today. They are professionally focused; their education does not orient them to the wide contours of the world. They acquire the training they need to travel to the frontier and make discoveries of their own, and as fast as possible, because life at the growing edge is expensive and chancy. The most productive scientists, installed in million-dollar laboratories, have no time to think about the big picture and see little profit in it. The rosette of the United States National Academy of Sciences, which two thousand elected members wear on their lapels as a mark of achievement, contains a center of scientific gold surrounded by the purple of natural philosophy. The eyes of most leading scientists, alas, are fixed on the gold.

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson

"It's funny, that," said Mr. Gedeon. "Doesn't seem to matter much what the building looks like on the outside: it's as though, when they all move in, they bring their own space with them. I've often wondered why that might be, and I think I've come up with an answer of sorts. It's the natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all situated between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite. The Caxton takes that to its logical conclusion."

Night Music: Nocturnes Volume 2 by John Connolly

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy's eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.

"You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he's history. He's forgotten. He's old. Tell him that we are the future and we don't give a f-(redacted) about him or anyone like him. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow."

Outward morality was so fastidious in these families that often it was considered scandalous merely to drop the name of a famous actress or dancer, or intelligent author, or the title of a novel. During visits to the lady of the house no lips would ever mention a topic of conversation that might be considered even remotely free, and dialogues centred exclusively on religion, illness, the children's upbringing, or questions regarding servants or property. And in a very vague way, from a very peculiar angle, politics might be commented upon.

Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra

(eta Oh, dear--the story takes place in Barcelona in the 1920's, not Asia Minor in the bronze age.)

"There is nothing that cannot be seen from
the standpoint of the "Not-Iʻ. And there is
nothing which cannot be seen from the
standpoint of the ʻIʻ. If I begin by looking at
anything from the viewpoint of the ʻNot-Iʻ, then
I do not really see it, since it is ʻNot-Iʻ that sees
it. If I begin from where I am, and see it as I
see it, then it may become possible for me to see
it as another sees it. Hence the theory of reversal,
that opposites produce each other, depend on
each other, and complement each other."

The Way of Chuang Tzu by Chuang Tzu
ed. (and sometimes revised) by Thomas Merton

Once outside, Theodosia walked briskly in the direction of the Featheredbed House. The sun shone down warmly. The breeze off the Cooper River was light and tasted faintly salty. White, puffy clouds scudded overhead. But what should have been a glorious day to revel in when relatively unnoticed by Theodosia, so preoccupied was she by recent events.

Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs

She was responsible for their welfare, and it was a tough job because there were so goddamned many of them, and some of them were actually older, like her cousin Elvira. Elvira was fourteen, and blossoming. One day, she decided to cross the woods through a short cut that separated her from the rest of the kids, returning home from some errand or chore, and Gramma had decided to follow her. When they arrived at the wooden fence, which served as a boundary between their farm and their neighbor's Elvira was suddenly grabbed from behind in ambush by the eldest son of that neighboring family, a lean boy in his twenties, who set about to tumble her in the field, right there. But this was Gramma's family, and she was having none of it. She grabbed a log and brought it down hard on the back of his head while hew as trying to pin down her cousin.
The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez

Because introversion is not synonymous with shyness or aloofness, true introverts are harder to identify than you might think. You can't always look for wallflowers or people staring at their feet to determine who the introverts are. Healthy introverts are not recluses. Just because we are oriented towards our inner worlds does not necessitate that we live in a private (private italic) world, devoid of social contact and activity. It means that whatever context we are in, we are preisposed toward what is happening inside of us more than we are in what is taking place around us. Intorverst can be in an unruly crowd, still immersed in our internal worlds.

https://www.librarything.com/work/8914654/book/133599001 by Adam S. McHugh