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unearths some literary gems.
From Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, by H. J. Jackson:
***
The word itself, which Coleridge may well have used ironically to make light of his own pretensions, has stuck: readers seem to find that its Latinity confers a degree of seriousness and erudition that 'notes,' 'remarks,' 'comments,' and even 'annotations' lack.
[Or, as I wrote myself many years ago in The Quotable Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, "The lay reader might not recognize the drunken, illegible scrawlings that deface the text as the cryptic, inebriated marginalia that attract the true scholar."]
***
[A nineteenth-century child, in the course of asserting ownership of a book by writing her name in it, shows a sophisticated conception of the universe as a vacuum that compensates for her uneven grasp of geography.]
"Ann Owen Hay | Hadley | Barnet | Middlesex | England | Great Britain | Europe | P. Ocean [sic] | World | Air | Nothing."
[No turtles!]
***
[Pre–Digital Era Cultural Scapegoats dept.: In a work called The Library from 1781, poet George Crabbe blamed, among other factors, "publication in parts...and light reading for a general loss of concentration and readerly stamina."]
***
[Coleridge] might simply have been carried away by the momentum of his sentence....
[Hey, it happens to the best of us.]
***
[From a very specialized ad hoc notation system that Coleridge created to criticize passages written by Southey.]
"N. means Nonsense."
***
Grafton describes a "raft of editions" of major and minor classical authors published between 1650 and 1730, "in all of which the voices of the arguing commentators threatened to drown the thin classic monotone of the original text."
***
[Speaking of blank books.]
[Kenneth Grahame] whimsically spoke up for "the absolute value of the margin itself" and wondered when the world might hope for "a book of verse consisting entirely of margin."
[In an unrelated passage, Jackson describes preliterate children's encounters with books as "seeing only blanks in books."]
***
The relationship between book and reader may be as fraught as any close human relationship, with the special frustration of one partner's being insensate and unchangeable.
[Except if it's The Young Wizard's Hexopedia, of course. (:v>]
***
By "author" here and hereafter I normally mean not the actual writer but Wayne Booth's "implied author"--the person inferred from the text on the page, the one we have seen annotators address as "you."
[I once did some kind of gag involving "the author" vs. "the writer," but I didn't realize that in Theoryland, this was actually a thing! But of course it is.]
***
[A bit of a Coleridge marginalium, written in response to a Wordsworth marginalium.]
"I can by no means subscribe to the above pencil mark of W. Wordsworth...."
***
But [Coleridge] was still nimble mentally, and in his notes he gives constantly the impression of someone running upstairs taking the steps two at a time.
***
The British Library copy of Richard Clark's Reminiscences of Handel, extra-illustrated by the author... is--not to put too fine a point on it--the work of a nutter; but it represents the Victorian love of trivial particulars and is in any case a captivating monument to the intractability of folly.
***
[Joanna Southcott] died in 1814, having literally failed to deliver--she announced herself, in her sixties, as about to give birth to Shiloh, the promised "man-child" of the Book of Revelation, but he never appeared....
***
Alfred Russel Wallace's Contributions to The Theory of Natural Selection (1870).... is a varied collection of essays on natural history; it contains one, for instance, titled "The Philosophy of Birds' Nests."
***
There may well be rare-book collections that would show a book the door if they found a note in it.
[I just like the image of a book being "show[n] the door" by a collection of books.]
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unearths some literary gems.
***
Let me take you back, and take myself back too. (What good is it if I take you back and leave myself here? Who then will tell you the dark tale?)
***
From Crown Witness, by Gillian Linscott:
***
He stood out from the crowd as he always did, more than six feet tall and as thin as a column in a ledger, always looking slightly baffled to find himself wherever he happened to be, as if he'd started the day in ancient Athens then found himself by some inexplicable accident elsewhere in time and place.
***
Like most of the rest of the men he was bearded, although in his case it was more like the fringe on a mantelpiece, looking as if it were in danger of losing its grip on his pink and shiny face.
***
From The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker:
"For the past two years I have been up to my handsome (if I do say so myself) Harold Macmillan mustache in evidence."
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unearths some literary gems.
From Murder, I Presume, by Gillian Linscott:
***
[Suddenly, a "Nonsense" rang out.]
"Nonsense."
The word rang out loud and clear from the gallery....
***
"Remember what the Bedouin say, young Peter: 'He who is a friend to both sides drinks bitter coffee.'"
I think he makes up these proverbs as he needs them.
***
"Bloke with eyebrows you could hang cups from...."
***
"It is so kind of you, Mr Pentland. She's enjoying it so much and--"
I'd had enough of this social play-acting. Mrs Bell had dozed comfortably through the first two acts and, in my opinion, wouldn't have noticed whether we were at the opera or at the circus.
***
The curtain went up and you couldn't hear yourself think for sopranos and tenors telling each other secrets at the tops of their voices.
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unearths some literary gems.
From A Voyage of Consolation:
***
Brother Eusebius, when he found Demetrius in bed, also took it for granted that we had gone on ahead. He did not inquire, he said, because the virtue of taciturnity being denied to them in the exercise of their business, they always diligently cultivated it in private. My own conviction was that they were not on speaking terms.
***
"Perhaps I jump rather hastily to conclusions sometimes. It's a family trait. We get it through the Warwick-Howards on my mother's side."
"Then, of course, there can't be any objection to it."
***
A note of momma's occurs here to the effect that there is a great deal too much fine art in Italian hotels, with a reference to the fact that the one at Naples had the whole of Pompeii painted on the dining room walls. She considers this practice embarrassing to the public mind, which has no way of knowing whether to admire these things or not, though personally we boldly decided to scorn them all.
***
Dicky and I took it with the more moderate appreciation natural to our years, but it gave us the greatest pleasure to watch the simple and unrestrained delight of momma and poppa, and to revert, as it were, in their experience, to what our own enjoyment might have been had we been born when they were. "No express agents, no delivery carts, no baggage checks," murmured poppa, as our trunks glided up to the hotel steps, "but it gets there all the same." This was the keynote of his admiration--everything got there all the same. The surprise of it was repeated every time anything got there.
***
At this I opened my eyes inadvertently--nobody could help it--and saw the barometrical change in poppa's countenance. It went down twenty degrees with a run, and wore all the disgust of an hon. gentleman who has jumped to conclusions and found nothing to stand on.
***
I offered him sandwiches, but he seemed to prefer his moustache.
***
Leaving out the scenery--the Senator declares that nothing spoils a book of travels like scenery--the impressions of St. Moritz which remain with me have something of the quality, for me, of the illustrations in a French novel.
***
Mr. Malt declared himself so full of the picturesque already that he didn't know how he was going to hold another castle.
***
[Patron saints, jesters, and harmless oaths]:
In connection with Heidelberg I wish there were something authentic to say about Perkeo; but nobody would believe the quantity of wine he is supposed to have drunk in a day, which is the statement oftenest made about him, so it is of no consequence that I have forgotten the number of bottles. He isn't the patron saint of Heidelberg, because he only lived about a hundred and fifty years ago, and the first qualification for a patron saint is antiquity. As poppa says, there may be elderly gentlemen in Heidelberg now whose grandfathers have warned them against the personal habits of Perkeo from actual observation. Also we know that he was a court jester, and the pages of the Calendar, for some reason, are closed to persons in that walk of life. Judging by the evidences of his popularity that survive on all sides, Mr. Malt declared that he was probably worth more to the town in attracting residents and investors than half-a-dozen patron saints, and in this there may have been more truth than reverence. The Elector Charles Philip, whose court he jested for, certainly made no such mark upon his town and time as Perkeo did, and in that, perhaps, there is a moral for sovereigns, although the Senator advises me not to dwell upon it. At all events, one writes of Heidelberg but one thinks of Perkeo, as he swings from the sign-boards of the Haupt-Strasse, and stands on the lids of the beer mugs, and smiles from the extra-mural decoration of the wine shops, and lifts his glass, in eternally good wooden fellowship, beside the big Tun in the Castle cellar. There is a Hotel Perkeo, there must be Clubs Perkeo, probably a suburb and steamboats of the same name, and the local oath "Per Perkeo!" has a harmless sound, but nothing could be more binding in Heidelberg. Momma thought his example a very unfortunate one for a University town, but the rest of us were inclined to admire Perkeo as a self-made man and a success. As Dicky protested he had made the fullest use of the capacities Nature had given him, it was evident from his figure that he had even developed them, and what more profitable course should the German youth follow? He was cheerful everywhere—as the forerunner of the comic paper one supposes he had to be—but most impressive in his effigy by his master's wine vat, in the perpetual aroma that most inspired him, where, by a mechanical arrangement inside him, he still makes a joke of sorts, in somewhat graceless aspersion of the methods of the professional humorists.
***
"My dear Dick, Isabel thinks you're engaged. So does her mamma. So does Mr. Mafferton."
"Who to?" exclaimed Mr. Dod, in ungrammatical amazement.
"I looked at him reproachfully. Don't be such an owl!" I said.
Light streamed in upon Dicky's mind. "To you!" he exclaimed. "Great Scott!"
"Preposterous, isn't it?" I said.
"I should ejaculate! Well, no, I mean—I shouldn't ejaculate, but—oh, you know what I mean——"
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unearths some literary gems.
From Caravaggio's Angel, by Ruth Brandon:
***
An oak wood at the field's edge photosynthesized in the sunshine.
***
An electric storm was flickering on the horizon, spasmodically lighting the far-off hills like a faulty million-watt bulb.
***
I decided to join him on his high horse--there was plenty of room for two.
***
My questions would have introduced a note--more than a note, a whole chord, a virtual orchestra--of uncertainty.
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unearths some literary gems.
[From Michael Innes's Honeybath's Haven]:
Honeybath remembered that the third-person-singular treatment was administered by Melissa only in a standing position.
***
[From Appleby Talks Again]:
***
"We hear him approaching with a sinister limp.... Your bravado deserts you. Out of compassion for your pitiable condition, I consent to our hiding in a cupboard. And there the man finds us."
"I never heard such rot. Such a thing has never happened to us. Or only once."
***
"Old Josiah Hopcutt," Appleby said, "was a prosperous manufacturer. And he continued prosperous when he had ceased to manufacture anything except large-scale tedium for the people looking after him."
***
[From Appleby and Honeybath]:
***
The books were all outsize folios, and bulky at that. They looked as if they had come into being at the hands of Johann Guttenberg in Mainz round about the middle of the fifteenth century and had been putting on weight ever since.
***
"A matter of untransacted business, as it were."
"Untransacted fiddlesticks!"
***
Miss Arne, Appleby reflected, drew ink-horn terms from one willy-nilly.
***
[From Michael Innes's The Long Farewell]:
"If, one day, something very surprising turned up about him, you wouldn't—so to speak—be very surprised. And yet this circumstance—that you wouldn't be surprised by a surprise—was surprising in itself."
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unearths some literary gems.
[From Lawrence Block]:
"Even when we were in outer space, smack in the middle of the Asterisk Belt, there was a part of my mind that knew I'd want to be rid of her sooner or later."
“Essentially,” Carolyn said, “you’re saying the poor woman was /verklempt/.”
“If that means what it sounds like, then that’s what she was.”
***
"Where?"
"The only place I can think of is Three Guys."
"I think you mean Two Guys."
"Jesus, don't you think I can count?"
***
"Still, wouldn't some passerby be whimsical enough to snap up a guidebook to a country that no longer existed?"
Evidently not. I found the promised pair of dollar bills inside the book's front cover, considered leaving them there to reward whimsy, decided whimsy was its own reward, and gave them a home in my wallet.
***
"Maybe that's what the mystery meat was this afternoon."
"Unicorn? I hope not."
"So do I. I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones."
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From R. Holmes & Co., by John Kendrick Bangs
***
the lemon curl giving it the vertebrate appearance that all stiff drinks should have
***
I smiled broadly, and slapped the breakfast-table so hard in my satisfaction that even the shredded-wheat biscuits flew up into the air and caught in the chandelier.
***
Breakfast over, I went to my desk to put the finishing touches to a novel I had written the week before, when word came up on the telephone from below that a gentleman from /Busybody's Magazine/ wished to see me on an important matter of business.
"Tell him I'm already a subscriber," I called down, supposing the visitor to be merely an agent. "I took the magazine, and a set of Chaucer in a revolving bookcase, from one of their agents last month and have paid my dollar."
***
"'Now, Mrs. Burlingame,' said I, 'that leaves four persons still in the ring—yourself, your husband, your daughter, and the Duke of Snarleyow, your daughter's newly acquired fiancé, in whose honor the dinner was given.
***
"Aha!" said I. "That's the milk in the cocoanut, is it?
***
"If it were not for her pearl rope, Mrs. Wilbraham Ward-Smythe could go anywhere she pleased without attracting any more attention from me than a passing motor-car.
***
"Aha!" said I. "And you think—"
"I don't think, Jenkins, until the time comes. Gray matter is scarce these times, and I'm not wasting any of mine on unnecessary speculation," said Raffles Holmes.
***
"Keep up the talk, Jenkins," he said. "The walls are thin here, and it's just as well, in matters of this sort, that our neighbors should have the impression that I have not gone out. I've filled the machine up with a choice lot of songs and small-talk to take care of my end of it. A consolidated gas company, like yourself, should have no difficulty in filling in the gaps."
***
There was the Honorable Poultry Tickletoe, the historian, whose articles on the shoddy quality of the modern Panama hat have created such a stir throughout the hat trade; Mr. William Darlington Ponkapog, the poet, whose epic on the "Reign of Gold" is one of the longest, and some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high place among the caricaturists of the age, Robert Dozyphrase, the expatriated American novelist, now of London, whose latest volume of sketches, entitled /Intricacies/, has been equally the delight of his followers and the despair of students of the occult....
***
"What are you going to do now?" I asked. "Write to Bruce and tell him the facts?"
Holmes's answer was a glance.
"Oh cream-cakes!" he ejaculated, with profane emphasis.
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unearths some literary gems.
From A Voyage of Consolation:
***
There was a delay, during which I listened attentively, with one eye closed--I believe it is the sign of an unbalanced intellect to shut one eye when you use the telephone, but I needn't go into that--and presently I got New York.
***
I heard a whistle, which I cannot express in italics.
***
We stayed over two or three trains in London, however, just long enough to get in a background, as it were, for our Continental experiences. The weather was typical, and the background, from an artistic point of view, was perfect. While not precisely opaque, you couldn't see through it anywhere.
***
"Did I get the four tickets--or two of them--or one? No, sir, I got a letter in the third person singular saying it wasn't a public entertainment!"
***
[Precursor to Judy calling Howard "Steve" in What's Up, Doc?]
"Don't you think we might be silent for a time, Alexander," she said.
Momma does call him Alexander sometimes. I didn't like to mention it before, but it can't be concealed for ever. She says it's because Joshua always costs her an effort, and every woman ought to have the right to name her own husband.
***
"When Emmeline leaves us," said her father, "I always have a kind of abandoned feeling, like a top that's got to the end of its spin."
***
There was something very unexpected about Miss Callis; momma complained of it. Her remarks were never polished by reflection. She called herself a child of nature, but she really resided in Brooklyn.
***
As we stood looking at the Eiffel Tower, poppa said he thought if he were in my place he wouldn't describe it. "It's old news," he said, "and there's nothing the general public dislike so much as that. Every hotel-porter in Chicago knows that it's three hundred metres high, and that you can see through it all the way up. There it is, and I feel as if I'd passed my boyhood in its shadow. That way I must say it's a disappointment. I was expecting it to be more unexpected, if you understand."
Momma and I quite agreed. It had the familiarity of a demonstration of Euclid, and to the non-engineering mind was about as interesting. The Senator felt so well acquainted with it that he hesitated about buying a descriptive pamphlet. "They want to sell a stranger too much information in this country," he said. "The meanest American intelligence is equal to stepping into an elevator and stepping out again." But he bought one nevertheless, and was particularly pleased with it, not only because it was the cheapest thing in Paris at five cents, but because, as he said himself, it contained an amount of enthusiasm not usually available at any price.
***
We saw our first Italian shrug. It is more prolonged, more sentimental than French ones.
***
"It takes the breath. What splendid revenue must be from that!"
The Senator merely smiled, and played with his watch chain. "I should hate to brag," he said, but anyone could see from the absence of a diamond ring on his little finger that he was a person of weight in his community.
***
Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch and a difference, and as we passed it the sound of the life of the city died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Cæsar's world, which lay below us, empty. We gazed in silence for a moment, and then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of blocks.
***
"You so often remind me of Punch, Mr. Mafferton."
I shouldn't have liked anyone to say that to me, but it seemed to have quite a mollifying effect upon Mr. Mafferton. He smiled and pulled his moustache in the way Englishmen always do, when endeavouring to absorb a compliment.
***
"One question at a time," said Mr. Mafferton, and I think he smiled.
"Now you remind me of Sandford and Merton," I said, "and a place for everything and everything in its place. And punctuality is the thief of time. And many others."
"You haven't got it quite right," said Mr. Mafferton with incipient animation. "May I correct you? 'Procrastination,' not 'punctuality.'"
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Uninvited Countess, by Michael Kilian:
["And I Don't Even Have a..." dept.]
"You know, Bedford, I'm spending a hell of a lot of time here on a case that's not in our jurisdiction." [...]
"So am I," said Bedford, "and I don't even have a jurisdiction."
***
From Dead Man Riding, by Gillian Linscott:
Talking to Dulcie was like hitting tennis balls into a feather bed. She absorbed what you said but nothing came back to you.
***
[From Wodehouse's Something New]
Mr. Beach was too well-bred to be inquisitive, but his eyebrows were not.
"Ah!" he said. "?" cried his eyebrows. "?--?--?"
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unearths some literary gems.
[Here's a nice oxymoron from an Inspector Appleby short story]:
Nothing was visible that did not almost ostentatiously blend with the whole.
***
[From The Penciled Frown, by James Gray: some excessive-consonant words and a flukey patron saint]:
***
He was repeating the names of those to whom he was being presented.
"Mr. Hirmmmmkenmmmm."
"Mrs. Barrtinddmmm."
"Miss Kinggytbbb."
***
Timothy brightened. "You believe in the gospel according to Saint Fluke."
***
[Some maledicta business from Wodehouse, in Pigs Have Wings]:
"To speak expleasantly, sir," he said, "I think the old ---- means to do the dirty on us."
It would perhaps have been more fitting had Sir Gregory at this point said "Come, come, my man, be more careful with your language," but the noun ---- expressed so exactly what he himself was thinking of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood that he could not bring himself to chide and rebuke. As a matter of fact, though ---- is admittedly strong stuff, he had gone even further than his companion, labelling Gally in his mind as a ****** and a !!!!!!.
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unearths some literary gems.
In his novel Cocktail Time, I discovered the Wodehouse version of the "pull up a chair" gag:
"Take a chair."
"I have."
"Take another," said Mr. Saxby hospitably.
***
[Also from Cocktail Time]
“Egad!” he said.
“M’lord?” said Rupert Morrison.
“Nothing, my dear fellow,” said Lord Ickenham. “Just egad.”
As the saloon bar was open for saying egad in at that hour, Mr. Morrison made no further comment.
***
[Elsewhere from Wodehouse]
"I was afraid you might have other engagements."
"My dear Clarence! As if any engagement, however other, could keep me from answering a cry for succor like yours."
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unearths some literary gems.
From Absent Friends, by Gillian Linscott:
[with an emphasis on lack of context]
***
It arrived quite out of the blue--or out of the mauve perhaps, since that was the colour of the stationery.
***
"Just as well your legal friends couldn't hear you putting leading questions to a piano."
[Context hint: seance.]
***
I fell asleep at last wondering if it were some fault in me that I could never imagine wanting to call anybody Tumtum.
***
From Bland Beginning, by Julian Symons:
"You know the kind of thing—how Henry James patted him on the head when he was five and said, 'I hope, my dear young friend, that you will always retain your present fine awareness of simple, and in fact incommunicable, emotion which it is the endeavour of a lucky few, quite simply, to communicate.'"
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unearths some literary gems.
From John Dickson Carr:
He never sat down in a chair without first turning it the wrong way round. He always said 'Ho, my lads!' when he came into a room, and he never went out of it without leaving the door open so that he could come back in again.
***
From Christianna Brand:
Inspector Cockrill is known to pick up any hat that happens to be at hand, to the considerable inconvenience of the true owner. Anything that does not actually deafen and blind him is acceptable.
***
From Nicholas Blake's "The Long Shot":
Eccentricity, as I see it, is nothing more than the visible track of the libido taking a short cut to the desired object.
***
From James Miles:
He had... a full moustache that threatened to encircle his head.
***
From Anthony Berkeley:
I had a picture postcard from him this morning. An incredibly blue Lake Como in the foreground and an impossibly white mountain at the back, with Cadenabbia sandwiched microscopically in between. Actually, though, he's in Bellagio for a few days.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Death Mask, by Jane Dentinger:
***
She was a perfect type, just like an E. F. Benson character but with sex.
***
From The Moonflower Murder, by Beverley Nichols:
***
She looked like a sharp, modern full-stop on a page of illuminated parchment.
***
[Rhetorical Questions Answered dept.]
"How dare you speak to me so insolently?"
"Because I do not care to have Krishna insulted."
***
[Metaphorical Typography That Is Not Reflected in the Actual Type dept.]
"Mrs. Kenneth Faversham?" echoed Waller, in block capitals.
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons:
***
This poem is reproduced by permission of the magazine Yes and No in which it first appeared.
***
In person Mrs P. is tall and angular with lots of flapping, jingling things about her.
***
“I asked if he would like to combine with me on my translations from the Chinese, and he was quite rude. And it’s difficult for me to do them alone, because I don’t really know any Chinese.”
***
“You do drink whisky, don’t you?”
“Does a cat swim?”
I couldn’t remember.
***
I’d come to the conclusion already that Woode was a damned bad detective, but one thing I must say for him, he has the queerest way of popping out by your side, almost from under your elbow or out of your pocket, when you don’t expect it.
***
Knew-it-all-the-time was now mixed with If-you’d-only-told-me-before in Woode’s expression.
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unearths some literary gems.
An author's note by Dorothy L. Sayers:
"Every person, incident, institution, college, firm or whatnot in this book is purely imaginary and is not intended to refer to any actual person, incident, institution, college, firm or whatnot whatsoever."
***
From Smallbone Deceased, by Michael Gilbert:
After she had gone he sat for some time, then resummoned Mrs. Porter from the typists' room and dictated a vigorous letter to Lady Buntingford's laundry. [I eventually realized this means the laundry-service business that Lady B. patronizes--but it was fun while it lasted!]
***
Hazelrigg leaned back again, and treated himself to another bout of swiveling. It was a lovely chair.
***
Good God, people would be coupling their names with--and--next.
[Though the typography is a bit strange--everything from the "with" through the "next," including the dashes, is all run together just as I've typed it, with no spaces--I think from the context that this is a blank map to the name of a law firm, i.e., [ ] & [ ].]
***
"Then he could pay the interest by check--to--"
"To whom?" said Mr. Birley and Mr. Craine in a grammatical dead heat.
***
"I see," said the Assistant Commissioner.
He drew a truculent rabbit on the scribbling pad in front of him: thought for a few minutes, then took out a four-color propelling pencil from his inside pocket and dressed it in a Harlequin tie.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Sister Beneath the Sheet, by Gillian Linscott:
He was in his early forties, brown hair just flecked with grey, a square, lined forehead and a jutting chin ending in a sharp ledge of a beard, like a cow-catcher on the front of an American railway engine.
***
“I, Jules Estevan, do solemnly swear that I spent the hours between seven o’clock and midnight last Wednesday insulting a friend about his poetry and drinking too much absinthe.”
“That’s a very long insult, Mr Estevan.”
“They were very bad poems, Miss Bray.”
***
I have achieved nothing so far towards ensuring the smooth transition to us of Topaz Brown's legacy, but I have acquired a pendant with a large opal, a set of underwear with ribbon and net trims and a kilo of cooked fish, since disposed of. This afternoon I visited the circus. It is now midnight and I am sitting in a magnolia tree. Hoping this finds you as it leaves me.
Yours,
Nell Bray
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unearths some literary gems.
From Audition for Murder, by Susan Sussman:
***
[Crackling static in an intercom brings us a couple of all-consonant words.]
"The dpthrrst of Msskkffll Lnnnnaas."
***
If you can't star at your own funeral, why bother going?
***
I regale him with witty, charming, pithy stories. He is more amused than ardent. I pith harder.
***
[I love it when a character in a book does exactly what *I* would have done.]
"I would love just once," Murray says, "to sit above the salt."
[...]
"Here." Beth puts a saltshaker under Murray's chair.
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unearths some literary gems.
Here, in a mystery story by Ernest Bramah, is a delightful twist on the "loquacious witness" trope: instead of giving her rambling testimony verbatim, he characterizes it from a scholarly distance!
"Mrs. Jones’s testimony, given on the frequently expressed understanding that she was quite prepared to be struck dead at any point of it if she deviated from the strictest line of truth, did not disclose any new feature, while its frequent references to the lives and opinions of friends not concerned in the progress of the drama threatened now and then to stifle the narrative with a surfeit of pronouns."
***
From a "To the Reader" note in The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People, by L. Frank Baum. Note also that this inclusive "we" is quite distinct from the authorial "I" appearing in the same sentence.
"These questions I realize should be answered before we (that "we" means you and the book) can settle down together for a comfortable reading of all the wonders and astonishing adventures I shall endeavor faithfully to relate."
***
Here's a grandfather clock that's anthropomorphized more than in name only, from Dorothy Sayers:
"The grandfather on the stairs was promptly eliminated [as the source of the chime being investigated]; his voice was thin and high and quavering, like the voice of the very old gentleman that he was."
And another bit from Sayers:
"Over a pair of very sharp gray eyes, heavy gray eyebrows hung like a pent-house."
***
Here's a Poirotism I like:
"My friend Hastings is, as you say in England, all at the seaside."
I also like Poirot's duodecimal-friendly self-criticism, when he says he is thirty-six times an imbecile. (I also like the more involved mathematics taking place on this particular occasion: "I have been not a triple imbecile, but thirty-six times one.")
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