Duncan

“If asked about Carlos, Less always calls him “one of my oldest friends.” The date of their first encounter can be pinpointed precisely: Memorial Day, 1987. Less can even remember what each of them wore: he, a green Speedo, Carlos, the same in bright banana. Each with a white-wine spritzer in hand, like a pistol, eyeing the other from across the deck. A song was playing, Whitney Houston wanting to dance with somebody. Shadow of a sequoia falling between them. With somebody who loved her. Oh, to have a time machine and a video camera! To capture thin pink-gold Arthur Less and brawny nut-brown Carlos Pelu in their youth, when your narrator was only a child! But who needs a camera? Surely, for each of them, that scene replays itself whenever the other’s name is mentioned. Memorial Day, spritzer, sequoia, somebody. And each smiles and says the other is “one of my oldest friends.” When of course they hated each other on sight.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“You can be cynical if you want.” “I am.” “But cynicism doesn’t accomplish anything.” “Untrue,” I say. “Cynicism saves lives.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son

“The grey hair, which has spoken of old age at once to writers and doctors, means to a painter not just grey hair, but a certain grey – perhaps a grey with silver lights and warm shadows, perhaps an opaque cold grey, but a grey as different from other greys as one chord in music is different from others.”
― Vanessa Bell, Sketches In Pen And Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook

“The two agents exchanged a look that was like stepping on a LEGO—quick and unpleasant.”
― Scott Meyer, Spell or High Water