I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
– Marlene Dietrich
Books: Favorite Quotes
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.
― 12th day of September, 1290
Earthly Remains by Michael Parker Pearson and Andrew T. Chamberlain
The Windeby Girl is one of a surprising number of Iron Age teenagers who ended up buried in bogs.
Edgar Allan Poe stories
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak.... Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”— here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”
― Roderick Usher’s final speech, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall... And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
― last lines, “The Masque of the Red Death”
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all the things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
― first lines, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life, and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner’s and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.
― last lines, “Some Words With A Mummy”
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
... [S]he was having a violent reaction against beautiful clothes and the slavery they impose on one, her experience being that the instant one had got them they took one in hand and gave one no peace till they had been everywhere and been seen by everybody. You didn’t take your clothes to parties; they took you. It was quite a mistake to think that a woman, a really well-dressed woman, wore out her clothes; it was the clothes that wore out the woman—dragging her about at all hours of the day and night. No wonder men stayed young longer. Just new trousers couldn’t excite them. She couldn’t suppose that even the newest trousers ever behaved like that, taking the bit between their teeth.
― Lady Caroline’s thoughts, ch. 6
... [I]t was her fate that however coldly she sent forth her words they came out sounding quite warm and agreeable. That was because she had a sympathetic and delightful voice, due entirely to some special formation of her throat and the roof of her mouth, and having nothing whatever to do with what she was feeling. Nobody in consequence ever believed they were being snubbed. It was most tiresome. And if she stared icily it did not look icy at all, because her eyes, lovely to begin with, had the added loveliness of very long, soft, dark eyelashes. No icy stare could come out of eyes like that; it got caught and lost in the soft eyelashes, and the persons stared at merely thought they were being regarded with a flattering and exquisite attentiveness. And if ever she was out of humour or definitely cross—and who would not be sometimes in such a world?—she only looked so pathetic that people all rushed to comfort her, if possible by means of kissing. It was more than tiresome, it was maddening. Nature was determined that she should look and sound angelic. She could never be disagreeable or rude without being completely misunderstood.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 6
Worse than jokes in the morning did she hate the idea of husbands. And everybody was always trying to press them on her—all her relations, all her friends, all the evening papers. After all, she could only marry one, anyhow; but you would think from the way everybody talked, and especially those persons who wanted to be husbands, that she could marry at least a dozen.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 8
To go away alone was bad; to think was worse. No good could come out of the thinking of a beautiful young woman. Complications could come out of it in profusion, but no good. The thinking of the beautiful was bound to result in hesitations, in reluctances, in unhappiness all around.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 8
Hardly anything was really worth while, reflected Mrs. Fisher, except the past. It was astonishing, it was simply amazing, the superiority of the past to the present. Those friends of hers in London, solid persons of her own age, knew the same past that she knew, could talk about it with her, could compare it as she did with the tinkling present, and in remembering great men forget for a moment the trivial and barren young people who still, in spite of the war, seemed to litter the world in such numbers.
― ch. 9
... Mrs. Fisher had never cared for maccaroni, especially not this long worm-shaped variety. She found it difficult to eat—slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always, too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr. Fisher. He had during their married life behaved very much like maccaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made her feel undignified, and when at last she had got him safe, as she thought, there had invariably been little bits of him that still, as it were, hung out.
― ch. 9
Sometimes it was just as if she didn’t belong to herself, wasn’t her own at all, but was regarded as a universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work. Really men... And she found herself involved in queer, vague quarrels, being curiously hated. Really women... And when the war came, and she flung herself into it along with everybody else, it finished her. Really generals...
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 10
What could one do with men when one had got them? None of them would talk to her of anything but the things of love, and how foolish and fatiguing that became after a bit. It was as though a healthy person with a normal hunger was given nothing whatever to eat but sugar. Love, love... the very word made her want to slap somebody. “Why should I love you? Why should I?” she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—somebody was always trying — to propose to her. But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 10
“The great thing is to have lots of love about. I don’t see... at least I don’t see here, though I did at home, that it matters who loves as long as somebody does. I was a stingy beast at home, and used to measure and count. I had a queer obsession about justice. As though justice mattered. As though justice can really be distinguished from vengeance. It’s only love that’s any good. At home I wouldn’t love Mellersh unless he loved me back, exactly as much, absolute fairness. Did you ever. And as he didn’t, neither did I, and the aridity of that house! The aridity...”
― Lotty Wilkins, ch. 11
... [T]he indelicate creature would certainly catch a chill, and then infect the entire party. Mrs. Fisher had a great objection to other people’s chills. They were always the fruit of folly; and then they were handed on to her, who had done nothing at all to deserve them.
― ch. 12
“Oh, but in a bitter wind to have nothing on and know there never will be anything on and you going to get colder and colder till at last you die of it — that’s what it was like, living with somebody who didn’t love one.”
― Lotty Wilkins, ch. 12
“I hate authors. I wouldn’t mind them so much if they didn’t write books.”
― Lady Caroline, ch. 12
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
... I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.
― Lorelei Lee
So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up, Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.
― Lorelei Lee
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
― first line, ch. 1
Howards End by E. M. Forster
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
— ch. 22
“Poetry’s nothing, Miss Schlegel. One’s thoughts about this and that are nothing. Your money, too, is nothing, if you’ll understand me. I mean if a man over twenty once loses his own particular job, it’s all over with him. I have seen it happen to others. Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It’s no good. It’s the whole world pulling. There always will be rich and poor.”
— Leonard Bast, ch. 27
Pity, if one may generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.
― ch. 28
“But he [Mr. Wilcox] must be one of those men who have reconciled science with religion,” said Helen slowly. “I don’t like those men. They are scientific themselves, and talk of the survival of the fittest, and cut down the salaries of their clerks, and stunt the independence of all who may menace their comfort, but yet they believe that somehow good—it is always the sloppy ‘somehow’—will be the outcome, and that in some mystical way the Mr. Basts of the future will benefit because the Mr. Basts of today are in pain.”
― ch. 22
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
― first lines, ch. 1
I am a king’s daughter,
And if I cared to care,
The moon that has no mistress
Would flutter in my hair.
No one dares to cherish
What I choose to crave.
Never have I hungered,
That I did not have.
I am a king’s daughter,
And I grow old within
The prison of my person,
The shackles of my skin.
And I would run away
And beg from door to door,
Just to see your shadow
Once, and never more.
― the princess’s song, ch. 6
Spiders and sowbugs and beetles and crickets,
Slugs from the roses and ticks from the thickets,
Grasshoppers, snails, and a quail’s egg or two —
All to be regurgitated for you.
Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and schemes,
Flying’s not near as much fun as it seems.
― a blue jay sings to her young, ch. 4
The cat said, “I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
― ch. 10
Looking Forward To Being Attacked by Lt. Jim Bullard
Chapter titles:
• You’ll Never Enjoy Being Attacked If You Don’t Change Your Attitude!
• The Principle of the Weakest Point Adds Zest to Being Attacked!
• Unbalancing an Unbalanced Attacker Is a Delight!
• Life Affords Few Pleasures That Can Equal the Striking of Vulnerable Areas!
• Applying Pressure Against Joints to Surprise, Bewilder, and Gain the Admiration of Your Attacker!
• Putting the Old Spark Back in Your Obscene Telephone Calls!
• Is It Ever Possible For You and Your Burglar to Have a Meaningful Relationship?
• Don’t Shoot the Peeping Tom; He May Be Your Next-Door Neighbor!
• Exhibitionists Could Be Nice If They Were Not So Bashful!
• Driving By Yourself Can Be Very Exciting!
• Walking Streets, Parking Lots, Alleyways, and Theater Aisles—Looking Forward to Being Attacked!
The delightful subject of this book is your being attacked: attacked on the street, in a parking lot, in an elevator, in your car, in your bedroom, in the library’s social science section, in your dentist’s office. Wherever you are in today’s social climate, you are subject to attack—which is terrific, because when you are finished with this book, you are going to be looking forward to being attacked! You will have so many wonderful surprises in store for your attacker that the pleasure will be all yours the next time you are attacked.
― ch. 1
... [L]inger on the scene long enough to tippy toe up and down on his head two or three times, then run off down the street screaming and laughing at the top of your voice. Would you please call the police; they would like to know how the silly clown got there like that with all those funny heel marks on his forehead.
― escaping a mugger's chokehold, ch. 3
There are five main vulnerable areas of the male body (four for the female body). Each one is a joy in itself. These vulnerable areas can be poked, squeezed, clapped, kicked, scratched, punctured, slashed, stomped, slapped, lacerated, spindled, folded, mutilated. To do all of these for one attack would be terribly bad taste, of course.
― ch. 4
Never strike for any other area when vulnerable area number one, the trachea, is open. If he is wearing a tie or clerical collar, then you will have to choose a second vulnerable area. If he is wearing earmuffs and a thick woolly scarf around his neck, you are limited to just three vulnerable areas. If you are attacked by a scuba diver you are in trouble.
― on vulnerable areas, ch. 4
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
― last lines
The Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.... And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
― first lines, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
“Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of Black Peter”
“What do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Red-Headed League”
“I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Sign of Four”
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet”
“What the deuce is it [the solar system] to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet”
“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Red-Headed League”
“You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”
― Dr. Mortimer, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.
― 12th day of September, 1290
The Windeby Girl is one of a surprising number of Iron Age teenagers who ended up buried in bogs.
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak.... Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”— here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”
― Roderick Usher’s final speech, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall... And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
― last lines, “The Masque of the Red Death”
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all the things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
― first lines, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life, and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner’s and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.
― last lines, “Some Words With A Mummy”
... [S]he was having a violent reaction against beautiful clothes and the slavery they impose on one, her experience being that the instant one had got them they took one in hand and gave one no peace till they had been everywhere and been seen by everybody. You didn’t take your clothes to parties; they took you. It was quite a mistake to think that a woman, a really well-dressed woman, wore out her clothes; it was the clothes that wore out the woman—dragging her about at all hours of the day and night. No wonder men stayed young longer. Just new trousers couldn’t excite them. She couldn’t suppose that even the newest trousers ever behaved like that, taking the bit between their teeth.
― Lady Caroline’s thoughts, ch. 6
... [I]t was her fate that however coldly she sent forth her words they came out sounding quite warm and agreeable. That was because she had a sympathetic and delightful voice, due entirely to some special formation of her throat and the roof of her mouth, and having nothing whatever to do with what she was feeling. Nobody in consequence ever believed they were being snubbed. It was most tiresome. And if she stared icily it did not look icy at all, because her eyes, lovely to begin with, had the added loveliness of very long, soft, dark eyelashes. No icy stare could come out of eyes like that; it got caught and lost in the soft eyelashes, and the persons stared at merely thought they were being regarded with a flattering and exquisite attentiveness. And if ever she was out of humour or definitely cross—and who would not be sometimes in such a world?—she only looked so pathetic that people all rushed to comfort her, if possible by means of kissing. It was more than tiresome, it was maddening. Nature was determined that she should look and sound angelic. She could never be disagreeable or rude without being completely misunderstood.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 6
Worse than jokes in the morning did she hate the idea of husbands. And everybody was always trying to press them on her—all her relations, all her friends, all the evening papers. After all, she could only marry one, anyhow; but you would think from the way everybody talked, and especially those persons who wanted to be husbands, that she could marry at least a dozen.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 8
To go away alone was bad; to think was worse. No good could come out of the thinking of a beautiful young woman. Complications could come out of it in profusion, but no good. The thinking of the beautiful was bound to result in hesitations, in reluctances, in unhappiness all around.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 8
Hardly anything was really worth while, reflected Mrs. Fisher, except the past. It was astonishing, it was simply amazing, the superiority of the past to the present. Those friends of hers in London, solid persons of her own age, knew the same past that she knew, could talk about it with her, could compare it as she did with the tinkling present, and in remembering great men forget for a moment the trivial and barren young people who still, in spite of the war, seemed to litter the world in such numbers.
― ch. 9
... Mrs. Fisher had never cared for maccaroni, especially not this long worm-shaped variety. She found it difficult to eat—slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always, too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr. Fisher. He had during their married life behaved very much like maccaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made her feel undignified, and when at last she had got him safe, as she thought, there had invariably been little bits of him that still, as it were, hung out.
― ch. 9
Sometimes it was just as if she didn’t belong to herself, wasn’t her own at all, but was regarded as a universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work. Really men... And she found herself involved in queer, vague quarrels, being curiously hated. Really women... And when the war came, and she flung herself into it along with everybody else, it finished her. Really generals...
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 10
What could one do with men when one had got them? None of them would talk to her of anything but the things of love, and how foolish and fatiguing that became after a bit. It was as though a healthy person with a normal hunger was given nothing whatever to eat but sugar. Love, love... the very word made her want to slap somebody. “Why should I love you? Why should I?” she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—somebody was always trying — to propose to her. But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence.
― of Lady Caroline, ch. 10
“The great thing is to have lots of love about. I don’t see... at least I don’t see here, though I did at home, that it matters who loves as long as somebody does. I was a stingy beast at home, and used to measure and count. I had a queer obsession about justice. As though justice mattered. As though justice can really be distinguished from vengeance. It’s only love that’s any good. At home I wouldn’t love Mellersh unless he loved me back, exactly as much, absolute fairness. Did you ever. And as he didn’t, neither did I, and the aridity of that house! The aridity...”
― Lotty Wilkins, ch. 11
... [T]he indelicate creature would certainly catch a chill, and then infect the entire party. Mrs. Fisher had a great objection to other people’s chills. They were always the fruit of folly; and then they were handed on to her, who had done nothing at all to deserve them.
― ch. 12
“Oh, but in a bitter wind to have nothing on and know there never will be anything on and you going to get colder and colder till at last you die of it — that’s what it was like, living with somebody who didn’t love one.”
― Lotty Wilkins, ch. 12
“I hate authors. I wouldn’t mind them so much if they didn’t write books.”
― Lady Caroline, ch. 12
... I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.
― Lorelei Lee
So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up, Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.
― Lorelei Lee
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
― first line, ch. 1
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
— ch. 22
“Poetry’s nothing, Miss Schlegel. One’s thoughts about this and that are nothing. Your money, too, is nothing, if you’ll understand me. I mean if a man over twenty once loses his own particular job, it’s all over with him. I have seen it happen to others. Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It’s no good. It’s the whole world pulling. There always will be rich and poor.”
— Leonard Bast, ch. 27
Pity, if one may generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.
― ch. 28
“But he [Mr. Wilcox] must be one of those men who have reconciled science with religion,” said Helen slowly. “I don’t like those men. They are scientific themselves, and talk of the survival of the fittest, and cut down the salaries of their clerks, and stunt the independence of all who may menace their comfort, but yet they believe that somehow good—it is always the sloppy ‘somehow’—will be the outcome, and that in some mystical way the Mr. Basts of the future will benefit because the Mr. Basts of today are in pain.”
― ch. 22
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
― first lines, ch. 1
I am a king’s daughter,
And if I cared to care,
The moon that has no mistress
Would flutter in my hair.
No one dares to cherish
What I choose to crave.
Never have I hungered,
That I did not have.
I am a king’s daughter,
And I grow old within
The prison of my person,
The shackles of my skin.
And I would run away
And beg from door to door,
Just to see your shadow
Once, and never more.
― the princess’s song, ch. 6
Spiders and sowbugs and beetles and crickets,
Slugs from the roses and ticks from the thickets,
Grasshoppers, snails, and a quail’s egg or two —
All to be regurgitated for you.
Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and schemes,
Flying’s not near as much fun as it seems.
― a blue jay sings to her young, ch. 4
The cat said, “I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
― ch. 10
Chapter titles:
• You’ll Never Enjoy Being Attacked If You Don’t Change Your Attitude!
• The Principle of the Weakest Point Adds Zest to Being Attacked!
• Unbalancing an Unbalanced Attacker Is a Delight!
• Life Affords Few Pleasures That Can Equal the Striking of Vulnerable Areas!
• Applying Pressure Against Joints to Surprise, Bewilder, and Gain the Admiration of Your Attacker!
• Putting the Old Spark Back in Your Obscene Telephone Calls!
• Is It Ever Possible For You and Your Burglar to Have a Meaningful Relationship?
• Don’t Shoot the Peeping Tom; He May Be Your Next-Door Neighbor!
• Exhibitionists Could Be Nice If They Were Not So Bashful!
• Driving By Yourself Can Be Very Exciting!
• Walking Streets, Parking Lots, Alleyways, and Theater Aisles—Looking Forward to Being Attacked!
The delightful subject of this book is your being attacked: attacked on the street, in a parking lot, in an elevator, in your car, in your bedroom, in the library’s social science section, in your dentist’s office. Wherever you are in today’s social climate, you are subject to attack—which is terrific, because when you are finished with this book, you are going to be looking forward to being attacked! You will have so many wonderful surprises in store for your attacker that the pleasure will be all yours the next time you are attacked.
― ch. 1
... [L]inger on the scene long enough to tippy toe up and down on his head two or three times, then run off down the street screaming and laughing at the top of your voice. Would you please call the police; they would like to know how the silly clown got there like that with all those funny heel marks on his forehead.
― escaping a mugger's chokehold, ch. 3
There are five main vulnerable areas of the male body (four for the female body). Each one is a joy in itself. These vulnerable areas can be poked, squeezed, clapped, kicked, scratched, punctured, slashed, stomped, slapped, lacerated, spindled, folded, mutilated. To do all of these for one attack would be terribly bad taste, of course.
― ch. 4
Never strike for any other area when vulnerable area number one, the trachea, is open. If he is wearing a tie or clerical collar, then you will have to choose a second vulnerable area. If he is wearing earmuffs and a thick woolly scarf around his neck, you are limited to just three vulnerable areas. If you are attacked by a scuba diver you are in trouble.
― on vulnerable areas, ch. 4
The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
― last lines
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.... And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
― first lines, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
“Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of Black Peter”
“What do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Red-Headed League”
“I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Sign of Four”
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet”
“What the deuce is it [the solar system] to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet”
“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Red-Headed League”
“You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”
― Dr. Mortimer, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”
― Sherlock Holmes, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
