It’s time for a quote roundup.
“I already know about the queen and that elves are looking for me. That’s why I got the flask.” Sylin raised it in a salute. “So I could take coffee with me and won’t need to visit the shop as often.”
“Your addiction is going to be your undoing.”
“Addictions often are.”
“Sandy June’s Legendary Is a No-Selfie Zone. Enforced by Elf on the Shelf. He Comes to the Rez for Summer Work.”
“Did you have to do Latin and Greek and things like that? My husband is terribly clever when it comes to useless languages and terribly stupid when it comes to everything else. I blame too much university. Do you know, just the other day, he climbed into the bath still wearing all his clothes. He said he was thinking about a book.”
“Dangerous habits,” observed Esther. “Men should not be allowed to challenge their delicate minds.”
“There were only two drunken knocks on the door during the middle of the night,” Sylin said, “by men who’d seen me go upstairs and hoped I was lonely and pining for their company.”
“Only two men bothered you? That’s a quality establishment.”
“My great-grandfather was a very bitter man. He spent his life trying to regain his titles and status.”
“I thought you said he was a Communist.”
“That was before he became poor.”
“Any lingo I’ve learned in the last twenty years has been against my will.”
“Fathers are remarkably resilient creatures. Mine once went three years without seeing me and claimed he hadn’t noticed.”
“That’s terrible.”
“That’s the aristocracy, my dear. We excel at emotional negligence.”
“There are few joys greater than watching a man squirm at the mention of women having opinions.”
“I am not certain I did anything in particular,” she said at last. “He seems to have come to that conclusion on his own.”
“Nonsense. Men rarely arrive anywhere without assistance—they merely persuade themselves that they have done so.”
“It takes a grown-up woman with a lot of confidence in her own judgment and reason to go along with something like this, because she is blessing her idiot partner to go do something that, if not necessarily stupid, is at the very least a hard swerve.”
“America is the greatest country in the world, a shining city on a hill, windswept, God-blessed, teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, humming with commerce and creativity. Being born as an American was like winning the lottery of life. America is a steroidal monster, consuming a quarter of the world’s energy while only holding 5 percent of its population, exporting our misery to the world, waging war for our own self-interested ends, our talk of democracy a soothing doublespeak, an opiate we compulsively consume to quiet the interruptive guilt we feel for the things done in our name between eating Domino’s pizza and bingeing Netflix. Both versions of America are true.”
“This country is full of people who would love to get rid of books and get rid of the Postal Service.”
AND MY NUMBER ONE QUOTE – THIS SPEAKS DEEP TO MY “ESSENTIAL WORKER” SOUL WHEN I HEAR PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT COVID TIME
“But now, when I heard people complain about Zoom meetings, about day drinking, about being bored, I felt something dark—not just jealousy, but hate.”
