Duncan

“The real heroine, if it be found possible to arrange her drapery for her becomingly, and to put that part which she enacted into properly heroic words, shall stalk in among us at some considerably later period of the narrative, when the writer shall have accustomed himself to the flow of words, and have worked himself up to a state of mind fit for the reception of noble acting and noble speaking.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

“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’ll support a Republican president in twenty years who’s worse than Reagan,” I explained. “Worse than Reagan?” Junior asked. “How’s that possible?” “Evolution. In the future assholes will be much larger than they are today.”
― Bob Smith, Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

“The machines had been in control of the Solar System for so long that there were whole elements of robot society who couldn’t believe humans had ever been a dominant species. The nearest thing the Earth had to an official record of the time before the toasters had vomited their last pop tarts was the Internet. But that, they argued, was hardly a reliable source. Even if it weren’t treason to access it in the first place, who could trust a repository of linked information that rewrote itself, and set so much store by talking cats?”
― Chris McCrudden, Battlestar Suburbia