Daniel Middleton

“While I was explaining to my own doctor that I was planning to undertake some serious exercise, I happened to mention that I thought I had lost quite a bit of weight since my last physical. “You didn’t lose it,” he said. “It just slipped around to your rear where you can’t see it.”
― Patrick F. McManus, The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

“You know how to check fer thin ice, boy?" he would ask me. "Wall, what you do is stick one foot way out ahead of you and stomp the ice real hard and listen fer it to make a crackin' sound. Thar now, did you hear how the ice cracked whan Ah stomped it? Thet means it's too thin to hold a man's weight. Now pull me up out of hyar and we'll run back to shore and see if we kin built a fahr b'fore Ah freezes to death!”
― Patrick Mcmanus, They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?

“Rancid was poor. He didn't seem to know that he was poor, however, and I never had the heart to tell him, because he was the happiest person I'd ever met. If he had known he was poor, of course, then he would have been sad and miserable all the time. As it was, Rancid was able to live out his whole life in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was poor.”
― Patrick F. McManus, They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?

“The machete was needed anytime you had to slash out your own trail. This necessity arose more often than a person who is not a kid with a machete might think.”
― Patrick F. McManus, A Fine and Pleasant Misery