Douglas Wirnowski

“A voyageur canoe, for several centuries, was by far the fastest mode of transportation into the wild heart of the North American continent. Propelled by the powerful arms of the voyageurs, commanded by the steersman, and paddling in exact unison at forty to sixty strokes per minute, these canoes surged through the water at four to six miles per hour, a remarkable speed. Paddling twelve to fifteen hours per day, with short breaks while afloat for a pipe of tobacco (they measured distances in terms of “pipes”) or a stop ashore for a mug of tea, they could cover fifty to ninety miles per day, unless they faced strong headwinds or waves that forced them to the shelter of shore, a state called degradé. During that single day each voyageur would make more than thirty thousand paddle strokes. On the upper Great Lakes, the canoes traversed hundreds of miles of empty, forested shorelines and vast stretches of clear water without ports or settlements or sails, except for the scattered Indian encampment.”
― Peter Stark, Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival

“One day David asked me how I felt about nudity. I told him I do it every day, briefly. He said he wanted to write a scene where I have sex in a bathtub with a prostitute at the Bella Union. “Why not,” I said. I had only tried sex in a bathtub once in real life. It was not to be recommended, just for the sheer mop-up factor afterward. But this was fiction. In one of many heartwarming father-and-daughter stories in Hollywood, Powers’s daughter, Parisse, was playing a prostitute who worked for him. David chose Parisse to be the lucky girl to join me in the tub. The irony was that Powers and I went to school together at SMU thirtysome-odd years before. Back in the old days I had spent some wonderful evenings with Powers and his wife, Pam, and their new baby, Parisse. One evening, after Powers had passed out, I was talking to Pam about horses and stained-glass windows. Pam went to get a couple more beers and asked me if I would diaper Parisse for her, who was a few months old at the time. So in an unlikely turn of events, I was going to have simulated sex in a bubble bath with a woman I had diapered in my past. For those who believe in a universe of probability, the odds of this one have to be lesser than finding sushi in South Dakota.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“I actually had misunderstood her name the entire time I knew her. Instead of Alice Nell I thought her mother was calling her Alice Snail. I loved snails. I ran over to her house with the mimosa flowers. I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I kissed her on the cheek. I still remember how warm and soft that cheek was. I knew from the movies that kissing a girl would be an important skill for me to learn. At night I would practice on my pillow. It didn’t feel anything like Alice Snail’s cheek. I needed to move up to something more girl-like. I switched to the stuffed rabbit I had in my bed. It was missing an eye and an ear. But it did have a mouth of sorts so it was a step up from the pillow.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers