Mark Dunn > Quotes

“Today we queried, questioned, and inquired. Promise me that come tomorrow, we will not stop asking why.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Would you mind doing this last thing for me? Pack my box with fivedozen liquor jugs?”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Perhaps in time, Ella, the words we have lost will fade, and we will all stop summoning them by habit, only to stamp them out like unwanted toadstools when they appear. Perhaps they will eventually disappear altogether, and the accompanying halts and stammers as well: those troublesome, maddening pauses that at present invade and punctuate through caesura all manner of discourse. Trying so desperately we all are, to be ever so careful.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Lately, I haph startet painting my torso in pretty, motley hews. I sit in phront oph the mirror in the sleepy-room. I atmire my hantyworg. I am a hooman apstrat paining.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“The Council is wrong. Yet, observe that none of us will risk telling it so, for fear of the consequences.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Love one another, push the perimeter of this glorious language. Lastly, please show proper courtesy; open not your neighbor's mail.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Hundreds of words await ostracism from our functional vocabularies: waltz and fizz and squeeze and booze and frozen pizza pie, frizzy and fuzzy and dizzy and duzzy, the visualization of emphyzeema-zapped Tarzans, wheezing and sneezing, holding glazed and anodized bazookas, seized by all the bizarrities of this zany zone we call home. Dazed or zombified citizens who recognize hazardous organizations of zealots in their hazy midst, too late - too late to size down. Immobilized we iz. Minimalized. Paralyzed. Zip Zap. ZZZZZZZZZ.

Crazy.
Crazy.
Did I say crazy?”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“U" is gone. I suppose you're aware. The 1st aeiouy to go. Up until now the other graphemes were not aeiouys. When the aeiouys start to go, Ella, writing to you turns exponentially more grueling. I will not throw in the towel, though. I trust that you won't either. I truly relish our partnership.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“We appreciate your coming to us with a copy of your letter to your sister, but it was unnecessary. Your offense was known to us even before the letter's receipt by your sister. Effective as of September 15 the primary responsibility of our isle's new assistant chief postal inspector has been to scan all post for use of illegal letters of the alphabet, then to make nightly reports to the Council. A report has been put on file on your behalf, your official sentence to be forthwith in issuance.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“There is indeed power in words. Most of the lasting change that has been forged in the history of this world came not from a wielding of the swift and bloody sword of battle but from the shaping scalpel of ideas, and what are ideas without the words to deliver them?”
― Mark Dunn, Under the Harrow

“For the present, it is easier for us to turn away. Our repulsion, you see, will not spur us to revolt until this plague moves much closer to home.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Instead of the calendrical terms Monday, Tuesday and so forth, we cheerfully offer the following surrogates. Use them freely and often, for their use honors us all. For Sunday, please use Sunshine. For Monday. pleasy use Monty. For Tuesday, please use Toes. For Wednesday, please use Wetty. For Thursday, please use Thurby. For Friday, please use Fribs. For Saturday, please use Satto-gatto.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“There is no one great man. Only millions of men and women in possession of tiny pieces of greatness, which when put together, when assembled in the aggregate make the whole. I am a piece of a very large jigsaw puzzle. One of the corner pieces. The one you go for first - important for a time, different from most of the others. But then, in the end, in the big picture, just one of many.”
― Mark Dunn, Ibid

“I suggested, further, that the following might be sculpted: a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs--piled high, toppling over, corks popping, liquor flowing. Disorder to match the clutter and chaos of our marvelous language. Words upon words, piled high, toppling over, thoughts popping, correspondence and conversation overflowing.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“His countenance, dear Ellakins, is no strain upon young female eyes!”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“please understand my unwillingness to trespass upon the Pony Expresspath; the sprinting Pony brother-couriers are Mercury-swift these days, and I would prefer that my obituary not read, “She was ingloriously run over by a fleet-footed fourteen-year-old.” If I am to have any choice in the matter, I would choose a less pedestrian death, thank-you-very-much.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“[Slipped beneath the minnow Pea front door]
Nollopton
Monty No-way 6
Insane woman named Ella:
Retreat is what we want. Go away. Let we alone.
Anonymess”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“We must respect that silence and make our decisions and judgments based upon science and fact and simple old-fashioned common sense—a commodity absent for too long from those in governmental elevatia, where its employ would do us all much good.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Love one another, push the perimeter of this glorious language.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“If I am to have any choice in the matter, I would choose a less pedestrian death, thank-you-very-much.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Today we queried, questioned, and inquired. Promise me that come tomorrow, we will not stop asking why”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“In the disquieting quiet, we wonder and worry, yet try to carry on some semblance of normal life.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters. (...) low order primate elevated to high order ecclesiastical primate, elevated still further in these darkest last days to ultimate prime A grade superior being. For doing that, which my father did without thinking.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“In the sanctuary of my thoughts, I am a fearless renegade. Yet in the company of the children I cringe and cower in a most depreciating way.”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“Sometimes I find myself laughing until I begin to choke”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“All present life is but an interjection, An “Oh!” or “Ah!” of joy or misery Or a “Ha, ha!” or “Bah!”—a yawn, or “Pooh!” Of which perhaps the latter is most true. —LORD BYRON”
― Mark Dunn, Zounds!: A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs?”
― Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters