ancientreader > ancientreader's Quotes

“Give me a moment, baby. I just need to roll those words over in my head a couple of times. ‘It’s really hard to climb a stripper pole when you’re wearing an ankle monitor.’ It’s like slutty poetry. I never dared dream that a child of mine would ever utter such a beautiful sentence.”
― Jess Whitecroft, Dirty Little Freaks

“You can’t show addicts a picture of a poo and say ‘You could crap like this if you join our rehab program.”
― Jess Whitecroft, Burn Me

“Because he would leave. Oliver felt sure of that. You couldn’t plant a tumbleweed and expect it to yield grapes, no matter how perfect the terroir. The summer was slithering away and in a month or so it would be time for harvest. Then fall would turn the fields to fire and when the leaves fell they would travel halfway around the world to cold, pearly-gray Paris. And then what?”
― Jess Whitecroft, The James Dean Vintage

“Good lord, Henry. You’re almost as strange a creature as me. Perhaps stranger, because you look so wholesome and brown and bonny, like a pretty ploughboy. Whereas nobody could ever mistake me for anything but what I am.” “And what are you?” “I’m a thief,” said Jem. “And a whore. A molly. A mary-anne. That’s what they used to call us back in London, us boys who dressed as girls and called one another sister.”
― Jess Whitecroft, Reckless

“Okay. How much do you need?”
“Couple of hundred. Three…”
“Three hundred?”
“You’re a fucking surgeon, Simon.”
“Junior orthopaedic surgeon,” he said. “It’s going to be a while before I’m pulling down consultant level cash. And even then I’d make more money if I’d become a footballer.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said. “I’ve seen you play football. You were always running away from the ball.”
“That’s because it was a heavy, leather projectile travelling rapidly towards my face.”
“Yes, but you were the goalkeeper.”
― Jess Whitecroft, Less Than Three

“He kisses the ski-jump tip that I hate, because of the way it makes me look like some startled small mammal sticking its nose out of a burrow. It’s been called cute, but that doesn’t make me more likely to forgive its effect on my profile. I’m thirty, which is around the age when ‘cute’ begins to look a little Baby Jane Hudson.”
― Jess Whitecroft, Burn Me

“I know getting Vegas married on cocaine is probably not the best start to a marriage”
― Jess Whitecroft, The James Dean Vintage

“Fine,” Will said. “I promise. I promise I’ll just bugger off whenever it seems like the easy way out for me, and leave you in this hundred-room hellhole with your family rubbing cheese-graters on your nerve endings. Is that what you want to hear?” “I detect a note of sarcasm.”
― K.J. Charles, Subtle Blood

“These two distinct crimes, with their different emphases on the individual and the group, grew side by side, yet over time genocide emerged in the eyes of many as the crime of crimes, a hierarchy that left a suggestion that the killing of large numbers of people as individuals was somehow less terrible.”
― Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

“The three things in life he’d wanted to avoid had all come to pass: “to wear eyeglasses, to lose my hair, and to become a refugee.”
― Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

“Sometimes,’ croaked Margaret in a voice bent ragged from two days’ crying, ‘when God sees a particularly pretty flower, He’ll take it up from Earth, and put it in his own garden.’ Margaret held me in the sort of tight, worried grip usually reserved for heaving lambs up a ladder. As she clenched my hand and told me God had specially marked my mother for death, a tear-damp thumb traced small circles on my temple. She stroked my hair. It was nice to think that Mammy was so well-liked by God, since she was a massive fan. She went to all his gigs – Mass, prayer groups, marriage guidance meetings; and had all the action figures – small Infant of Prague statuettes, much larger Infant of Prague statuettes, little blue plastic flasks of holy water in the shape of God’s own Mammy herself.”
― Séamas O'Reilly, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

“When I fuck you, Mr. Day, it will not be briefly. It will be long and hard and extremely thorough. I'm going to take pains with you.”
― K.J. Charles, The Magpie Lord

“O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.”
― Terry Pratchett