C.M. Waggoner > Quotes

“Prettiness is lent to you by youth; attractiveness is purchased with experience.”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“It was wonderful what one could accomplish when one threw everything away”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“She was in the habit of apologizing for making faces that men thought weren’t very pretty. It occurred to her, very briefly, that she resented being made to think about her face when she was trying to focus on the contents of her mind.”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“her perception of egregious enfucktation in her current, present, and unfortunate familial circumstances.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

“Men should never be too good-looking. It gave them ideas.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

“You’d think that they’d at least teach you the basics,” Sherry said, feeling aggrieved with the Catholic Church all over again. As if there weren’t enough wrong with them, they had to bogart all the anti-demon trainings. At the moment she’d give almost anything for a nice, modern, Unitarian Universalist exorcist. The Unitarian exorcist would probably be a Montessori school administrator with a master’s degree in social work with a focus in cross-cultural sensitivity in evil-spirit extraction. “You don’t have to be a doctor of demonology, but they could at least have given you the hour-long CPR certification course version, just in case there’s an emergency.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“It really was annoying, she thought, when the job for which she’d been formally trained and which she was paid to perform by the local government got in the way of her unpaid amateur homicide detection.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon Hunting Society

“She spent so much time pretending to be a nice old lady from a book that her actual, somewhat strange and ghoulish personality tended to take her by surprise.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Have you seen The Exorcist?”
“Um,” Sherry said. She wasn’t sure whether it was best to tell the truth or to lie when discussing popular movies with a possibly demonic individual calling himself Lucifer. She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t more frightened. Maybe she’d worked all her terror out the night before. “I read the book,” she said finally. It was the truth. She hoped that Lucifer wouldn’t be disappointed.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“She didn't see why, in a moment of great personal trial for her, he felt such a great need to talk about his feelings for her, as if whether or not he still thought she would make someone a fine wife one day must be her greatest concern.”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“Put that on." He did. She knelt. "Get on my back."
He recoiled. "I will not."
"You fucking will," she said. "It's snowing out there. Up to your knees. You'll slow us down. I wont die for your pride, Pink." He got on her back.
She slung her fur cloak around both of them and left the cave without a glance behind her.”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“Mrs. Medlow, Delly’s landlady, had a sitting room thoroughly enkittenated on nearly every surface that was not already too thickly barnacled with ribbons, doilies, and porcelain shepherdesses to be an appropriate canvas for kittenization.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

“Attractiveness is a function of personality. Prettiness is lent to you by youth; attractiveness is purchased with experience.”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“We shouldn’t miss an opportunity to find interest in the beauties of nature, when we’re both so fond of feeling interested.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

“Do you think I should buy some crystals?”
“Crystals?” Father Barry asked. “What kind?”
“You know,” she said. “The kinds they have in the New Age store. For the…auras and things. To protect us against the demons.”
“Sherry,” he said. “I’m a priest.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “You can’t recommend anything that comes from the competitors.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Altogether, Alan was the human equivalent of a subscription to the New Yorker. Her thinking that would mortify poor Alan, of course. He wasn’t a snob; he was the sort of earnest, kindhearted, well-to-do liberal who seemed to truly feel terrible about all his money.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Gretsella drew herself up and narrowed her eyes. “I trouble men,” she said. “They do not trouble me. As for my choice to eat cake for breakfast”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale

“He, like many citizens of Winesap, thought of New York City as a place populated entirely by people who were all simultaneously wealthy snobs and desperate knife-wielding purse snatchers.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“When she checked out, the youth and disinterested politeness of the pimply teenager at the register nearly made her cry. It would be nice, she thought, to be a pimply teenage girl who worked at a supermarket and hadn’t yet had the chance to do a dozen things that she would regret for the next thirty years.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Indeed,” said the cat, and stretched one of his front legs forward and pointed his nose toward the ground as if he was maybe planning on grooming his belly. It took her a moment to realize that he was trying to bow. “I am at your service, Mistress Pinkwhistle.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“A young girl had recently called Sherry adorable, and Sherry had decided to take it as a compliment. Maybe she was adorable. She’d recently seen a segment on the evening news about some panda bears at the Boston Zoo that had featured one of them rolling placidly down a gentle slope. It had been extremely adorable. There could be worse things in life than to resemble that panda bear.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Then, just to make very sure that she would fall asleep promptly, she put herself into a nice hot bath with Anna Karenina. She'd barely made it through two pages of Levin holding forth on all the extremely important modern innovations he wanted ot bring to nineteenth-century Russian agriculture when she almost dropped the book in the bath. She'd started to nod off. Perfect. She'd tried many methods over the years to treat her occasional insomnia, but she'd yet to find one as reliably efficacious as Tolstoy.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Sherry generally thought of authors as powerful and mysterious creatures, like Olympians, but if she ever met one in person, she would feel compelled to speak to her kindly but sternly on the topic of hair. There seemed to be a general agreement among authors that unruly hair was a sign of a free-spirited and artistic nature, as if zaniness was extruded through the follicles. I’m afraid, Sherry imagined saying to the author (who would have very tidy blonde hair in a chignon and be wearing a cream-colored silk blouse), that I’m not free-spirited and artistic at all. I’m very cautious and conventional. I clip coupons for laundry detergent out of the monthly mailer, have only ever slept with one man, and never learned how to appreciate poetry. My hair just comes out of my head like this.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“At the moment she’d give almost anything for a nice, modern, Unitarian Universalist exorcist. The Unitarian exorcist would probably be a Montessori school administrator with a master’s degree in social work with a focus in cross-cultural sensitivity in evil-”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Prithee, sir,” Sherry said, “that sounds like you just made it up.” The cat puffed up his tail at her. “Of course it’s made up,” he said. “As are all things that matter. If you and I stood before a priest and asked to be married now, we would be refused, but had I the shape of a man, the priest could say a few words and bind us unto eternity in the eyes of all laws on earth and heaven. What aspect of that is not made up? My form and yours, the words, earthly law? Belief, all of it. Adherence to convention. A convention much younger than I am, woman, and laws that were made when she was already older than most rivers. She hews to more ancient laws. And so must you, Mistress Pinkwhistle, if you hope to have the best of her.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Yeah. Don't cook. Can't use a knife. Don't sew. What do gentlemen do?”
― C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic

“Alan, absurdly, was Sherry’s…she wasn’t sure, really. The word boyfriend was too ridiculous, and lover would be inaccurate. Gentleman friend, maybe. Alan didn’t seem to mind that she was keeping things to the occasional brief kiss after many months of dating. He bought her dinner once a week, and they drank wine and talked about books together, and she never once had to pick up his socks. It was perfect.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“I do trust that God won’t give me anything that I can’t handle, but I definitely wasn’t hoping for demons. It just … looks like it might be demons.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon Hunting Society

“Oh, these look interesting,” she said encouragingly. She always felt a sort of kinship with small children who checked out big dry books on the sorts of topics that peculiar, uncoordinated children tended to be interested in, like wild horses and dinosaurs and ancient Rome.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“How would you kill someone?” Sherry asked, curious. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. On TV, pushing people down the stairs works really well to avoid suspicion, but on TV, everyone seems to fall down a few steps and then die instantly. In real life I think they’re more likely to just sprain their wrist or something, unless they’re about ninety years old. You’d probably have to push them down the stairs once a day for a month until you got lucky and they banged their head at the right angle, and that would definitely look suspicious. Or I thought about hiring a hit man, but then you have to rely on the guy you hire not being either completely incompetent or an undercover FBI agent. Really, I think the best way to kill someone and get away with it is to buy an unlicensed gun from a criminal, wear gloves while you shoot a stranger in the middle of the night, and then throw the gun into the Hudson. It would have to be a stranger because as soon as you have a decent motive, you’re a suspect. But I wouldn’t have any reason to want to kill a stranger, so now there’s no point to killing someone in the first place. You might as well skip the whole thing.” “You have thought about this,” Sherry said, impressed.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society