Wry Quotes

“What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing”
― Willem Lange

“The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op

“You see. . . it's really quite strenuous doing nothing all day, so once a week we take a holiday and go nowhere, which was just where we were going when you came along. Would you care to join us?”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“your best men are
drunks and your worst men are
locking them
up,
your best men are killers and
your worst men are
selling them
bullets”
― Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

“Vegard and Riston's job today was to guard and protect me. And considering that I was in a tower room in the Guardians' citadel, it looked like a pretty plum assignment. I mean, how much trouble could a girl get into under heavy guard in a tower room? Notice I didn't ask that question out loud. No need to rub Fate's nose in something when I'd been tempting her enough lately.

Phaelan had generously his guard services as well, just in case something happened to me that my Guardian bodyguards couldn't handle. Phaelan's guard-on-duty stance resembled his pirate-on-shore-leave stane of leaning back in a chair with his feet up, but instead of a tavern table, his boots were doing a fine job of holding down the windowsill. I don't know how I'd ever felt safe without him.”
― Lisa Shearin, Armed & Magical

“Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing. -Old Yao”
― Lin Yutang, Moment in Peking

“She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley

“His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses”
― Kamila Shamsie

“When we talk about Poetry, with a capital P, we are apt to think only of the more intense emotions or the more magical phrase: nevertheless there are a great many casements in poetry which are not magic, and which do not open on the foam of perilous seas, but are perfectly good windows for all that.”
― T. S. Eliot

“He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: 'I've got to go now.”
― Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market

“Sai stands in his spineless way, young but antiquated, studious but not clever, a thick steel watch on his wrist, his oiled black hair combed in the good-boy hairstyle.
He looks like the past of an old man”
― Manu Jospeh

“I am one strong sneeze away from a full-on breakdown at any moment”
― Megan E. O'Keefe, The Bound Worlds

“The Dark Ages are alive and secretly thriving like a herpes infection among us.”
― Juilette Fay

“Was he hitting some type of werewolf midlife crisis? First, he'd left Wolf Town, and now he was envisioning a mate. What next? Bird watching? Board games? Retirement homes?”
― Rose Wynters, My Wolf Fighter

“All I wanna do is play one game of nine-ball with God.”
― Paul Lyons, Table Legs

“You give me much good counsel," he said aloud. "I'm tired of it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea