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unearths some literary gems.
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unearths some literary gems.
The rest of the area was hung with truly awful artwork, paintings whose subjects--owl, hare, human--shared expressions of surprise, their looks in a kind of stasis as if needing to react but hesitating, as if the paintings were about to sneeze.
[Btw, I see that Google images brings up plenty of artwork depicting sneezing, including some fine-art paintings...but what I was hoping to find, yet didn't, would have been cartoonish sneezing paintings in the vein of what you've called "haunted paintings"--where the painting on the wall isn't *normally* sneezing, but sneezes because someone in the room is shaking out a carpet, or whatever.]
***
"Never mind about us."
It looked as if she would mind all over the place.
***
[Bonus: A minor character called Amy Dudgeon.]
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unearths some literary gems.
[This weird but well-written mystery novel was sort of "screwball gothic."]
***
"My past life has come up before my eyes so often it's beginning to look like a non-stop revue."
***
She...walked towards him with short, rather plodding steps, as though she was crossing an expanse of suet pudding.
***
[Who Needs Context? dept.]
"Oh, if you're going to make a scene about pepper," Prudence said, "I'll oblige by leaving the room."
***
Talking to him was like discussing the scenery with a fish, or a bird.
***
He was a grocer, and his appearance suggested that his shop was very small, and that the articles wanted by customers could only be reached by ladder.
***
"We can't describe them," Smith said in a voice that whined on a high note, like the wind in a chimney.
[By the way, this Smith (the grocer) is paired up with a drinking buddy called Benson. One of them is obsessed with his hobby of astrology, and one with his hobby of numerology, and they are perpetually scoffing at each other's hobbies.]
***
[This silly tangent from the protagonist's eccentric 16-year-old sister is probably my favorite passage in the book.]
"Harry keeps saying [Maurice is] trying to get Father's money"[....]
"Harry seems to know a lot about crime. Let me try curling my lip. Do you suppose when people curl their lips it's convex or concave?" She went to the glass over the mantelpiece. "It looks queer both ways. If I curl it up towards my nose it's worse, don't you think? People in those books must look odd, most of the time. 'She curled her lip. Her lip twitched.' Oh, I twitch better than I curl. I'll practise that one. Do you really think I should be twitching and curling at Maurice?"
***
It was a good shop, smelling of incompatible foods.
***
"My mind's moving now like a circular saw. I'm not sure now what I'm cutting. It might be monotony. It might be the branch I'm sitting on."
***
[Also from Prudence, the 16-y.o.]
"I'm sure this doesn't happen to other people getting ready for parties."
***
Hester smiled as though her face was being worked by electricity, while she wondered if real people ever said By Jove.
***
[Prudence again]
She was so glad that he had gone that she forgot she couldn't tango.
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Case of the Demented Spiv, by George Bellairs:
***You couldn't very well have a ghost in spectacles.[I bet the Oddfellow archives could prove that assertion wrong! (Btw, the context here is the problem of a nearsighted actor being cast as the Ghost in Hamlet.)]***A tall, fair-haired youngster, with huge nose and a quiff over one eye, detached himself with apparent reluctance and ambled, hands in pockets, to Littlejohn. He looked like a toucan.[I really like the way "he looked like a toucan" is given as sort of afterthought, or bonus.]***Menstone didn't look straight at you when he spoke, but over your left shoulder. As though you had a wraith by your side.***Her husband was always putting his innocent foot in it....he'd called Rainrider and Heathcote, Heathrider and Raincoat.***The bobby's eyes opened wide and looked ready to roll down his cheeks with surprise.***
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Resurrection Man, by Charlotte MacLeod:
***"The door...has a brass knocker with a face on it.""Anybody's we know?""I hope not. It's more of a symbolic face, like a satyr or a dryad or maybe a gargoyle. I'm not too swift on dryads."***He was wearing...an apologetic little bow tie of no particular color or pattern. He was the sort who tended to remind everyone of someone else. [Noel Coward would approve!]***[The elements in the authenticated painting] were the real McCoy, the guaranteed A-1, simon-pure article.[This sent me down a minor simon-pure rabbit hole. I wasn't familiar with the expression, so I learned about 18th-century theatre's Simon Pure. What was most interesting to me was the detail that, in addition to being a "thing" in itself, simon-purity spills over into real-McCoyness in an additional way--because, in the play in which he appears, someone impersonates Simon Pure, thus giving rise to "the real Simon Pure" as an expression in its own right, à la "real McCoy"! (I also wondered if "Simonizing[tm]" was rooted in simon-purity; but apparently it's just named after one George Simons.)]***"We put father back because the room looked so bleak with that big bare space over the fireplace," Anne explained, "but he doesn't really go at all well with the new slipcovers." [N.B. Slipcovers are funny.]***There was an easy chair and a not-so-easy chair. [I recall that recently, in some other book, we encountered an "uneasy chair." I'll watch out for variations on this theme!]***His head was shaped much like an old-time cheese box, long and angular.***
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unearths some literary gems.
***
If there were ever a man who, like Nature, could fill a vacuum, it was Melrose Plant. He could fill in a black hole; he could void a universal void.
***
Wiggins was talking...not as if he'd caught a cold but as if he'd invented them. His comments were cold-proprietary.
***
Chilten held the pause long enough to put the gum in his mouth and crunch it around, as if even the Chiclet were part and parcel of the overall mystery. [And, as I may have noted before, I think Chiclets are funnier than other gums.]
***
[The protagonists are in an herb garden.]
Jury blinked, looked at Wiggins, who looked rueful. And as if mood were an herb indicator, he looked round for it, the rue.
***
"It's a long story, Jury." [...]
"I'm in the long-story business, Ronnie."
[later in the scene]
"That's anybody's guess."
"But we're not," said Wiggins..."in the anybody's-guess business."
***
Sebastian raised his eyebrows again, the only part of him that questioned Jury's presence. Even that question appeared rhetorical, however.
***
A member was declaiming, "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish"....Melrose sat, waiting for the final "rubbish."
***
Melrose had always loved the way London streets simply left off being what they were and started being something else, as if naming streets were nothing but whim.
***
She looked around, as if words hung in the air from which she might take the right one.
***
Melrose slid his stool back from the bar as if this proximity to impossible coincidence were too much to take.
***
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