Not as harsh as it looks

The Queens staff conspire to put an end to her newly-found habit of book-reading by packing her bookworm page, Norman, off on a prestigious course on writing literature. They don't tell her where he's gone, so she has no reason not to believe that, like all the other disappearances in her life, he is not dead.

"Norman of course had not died, just gone to the University of East Anglia, though, as the equerries saw it, this was much the same thing"

Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

The joy of parenthood

At best, there's lots of hard work and deprivation.

Dr Benjamin Spock, Baby and Childcare.

The kindness of strangers

One of a pair of murderous killers-for-hire has met a woman he likes. As he's about to leave town, he decides to leave her something, handing it to a prostitute his brother Charlie had been with the night before for safekeeping...

"I pressed a hundred dollars into her hand. 'I want you to give this to her when she comes back.'

She stared at the money. 'Jesus Christ on a cloud.'

'I will return in two weeks' time. If I find she has not received it, there will be a price to pay, do you understand me?'

'Mister, I was just standing in the hall here.'

I held up a double eagle. 'This is for you.'

She dropped the coin into her pocket. Peering down the hall in the direction Charlie had gone, she asked, 'I don't suppose your brother'll be leaving me a hundred.'

'No, I don't suppose he will.'

You got all the romantic blood, is that it?'

'Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.'

I turned and walked away. A half-dozen steps, and she asked, 'You want to tell me what she did for this?'

I stopped and thought. I told her, 'She was pretty, and kind to me.'

And the poor whore's face, she just did not know what to think about that. She went back into her room, slammed the door shut, and shrieked two times.

Patrick de Witt, The Sisters Brothers

It's the heat

"On the path, the heat of my own body hung heavily about me, suffocating, and the humidity was so thick that to breathe was almost to drink."


Edward Docx, The Devil's Garden,

Because you're super

"Part of the problem with finding your superhero name is that it may refer to something you don't like about yourself. It may actually be the part of yourself you hate the most, would pay money to get rid of. Certainly the Perfectionist had a hard time coming to terms with her superpower. The Gambler, One Night and Brutally Honest all spent years accepting their superpowers.

The final stage of finding your superhero name is accepting how little difference it really makes. Okay, there's this one thing you can do, a thing you can do like no other person on the planet. That makes you special, but being special really doesn't mean anything. You still have to get dressed in the morning. Your shoelaces still break. Your lover will still leave you if you don't treat her right."


Andrew Kaufman, All My Friends Are Superheroes

Him

You know you're going to have fun with a new book when you find a Beautifully Put on the first page (ok, after the prologue, but you get the idea). Here are two of my favourite authors talking about Him upstairs...

"God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say circuitous, ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players*, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules and who smiles all the time."

*ie., everybody 


Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

On surviving hardship

“He had returned from his years on the Russian front with one important souvenir: the inability to get worked up about things that weren't three years on the Russian front.” 

Tibor Fischer, Under The Frog.