unearths some literary gems.
From Time to Change Hats, by Margot Bennett:
[First, you may be interested to know that the title turns out *not* to refer to a juncture at which one shifts roles--i.e., "changing hats" metaphorically--but rather to the deduction that, according to the prevailing theoretical timetable of the crime, the murderer, who seems to have re-dressed the corpse in different clothes, would actually not even have had "time to change hats." Literal hats!]
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"She lives with, for, or at a too charming male secretary, Forsyth."
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Paula...had fascinated me like a picture painted by--I couldn't imagine who would have painted the picture.
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I had met too many people in one day. I could understand none of them.
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She was not the type to drop a stitch; instead, she dropped the knitting.
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"The thing is to rub the police the right way. As for you, young man, I don't see why I should bother to rub you at all."
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"I deeply appreciate [his reading aloud to me].... With his help I have acquired a profound contempt for all poetry."
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"Everyone knows that everyone has read Hamlet, so each man assumes he has read it himself."
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"Why do you think she came here--to Clapham?"
"You want my honest opinion? You won't say 'Ah, cat!'"
I told her I had never said "Ah, cat" to anyone.
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"I have been in Australia. When I was seventeen I went to the wide, free life of a sheep station. It was very wide, very free, but I discovered that freedom, width, and sheep bored me equally."
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"The factory will get on without me very well....My work consists mainly of saying in amazement, 'That's a damned good idea!' And it usually is. I will say that things go nearly as smoothly when I'm there as when I'm not."
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"Wouldn't you die of boredom here?" she asked me. "Isn't it too deadly for words?" She went on with quite a lot of words.
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I felt conspicuous as I began to give my evidence, in fact I felt like a lone tomato in a sea of lettuce.
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[Regarding precisely when they heard a shot fired.]
"I am never interested in Time," she added. "I believe that Time is dynamic."
"Dynamic?" The coroner licked his lips nervously.
"I believe that it moves about," Paula explained clearly.
"Quite," the coroner mumbled.
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[Paula, the former actress, is still giving evidence in the coroner's court.]
"Do you believe in telepathy?" she appealed to the audience with a gesture that made her extravagant hat sway dangerously.
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[This is a funny ending to a scene between the protagonist and a teenage girl. In order to understand her and persuade her to cooperate with his investigations, he has determined to set aside his stereotypical assumptions about schoolgirls--that all they care about is field hockey, and all they do is giggle and get crushes on their schoolmistresses--and focus on her as an individual personality. This works out well, and indeed she is nothing like the stereotype, which by the end of the scene the reader may have forgotten all about. And then he says this to the reader!]
A little more encouragement and she would look like the girl who had been asked to tea by her favourite mistress to discuss the hockey match with St. Bede's.
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I walked into the Limes wearing a scowl on my mind if not on my face.
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[Expressive Necks dept.]
[The taxi driver] disapproved of people who caused trouble. I could read it on the back of his neck.
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She looked like the most intelligent of the Seven Dwarfs.
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"Wisney's just an old man with eyebrows."
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She shook her head gloomily, made a noise like an ancestral voice, and bobbed back into the house.
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(Anti)-bonus: The empty brackets below represent one of those instances where a snippet-marker fell out of the book, and I couldn't reconstruct where it came from. A blank map to a missing snippet!
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