Here are the answers to last week’s list of quotes from seventeen books:
- 1) “The way to a man’s heart is through his chest.” Use of Weapons, Iain Banks. This one was a little sneaky, as it’s in the poem on the opening page.
- 2) “…Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know…” One for the Morning Glory, John Barnes. A surprisingly delightful little book from an author whose other works inspired the rule “John Barnes books containing forcible sodomy are bad.” (Nothing was said about dinosaurs.)
- 3) “All is waves, with nothing waving, across no distance at all.” Songs of Earth and Power, Greg Bear. As I noted in comments to Friday’s post, if I ever lose my mind and write a quantum mechanics book, this will be in there somewhere.
- 4) “The tiny scout departed the universe in a manner that was picturesque, if ultimately lethal.” Startide Rising, David Brin. OK, he’s a little crazy, and can be unpleasant in person, but this remains the only book I’ve needed to replace because I read my first copy until it fell apart, and I still love it.
- 5) “He’s an actor. I guess he can’t be that good, or he wouldn’t be killing people for a living.” Thank You for Smoking, Christopher Buckley. Late in the book, Peter Lorre is revealed to be an international assassin. This isn’t one of the silliest plot points. A great Washington satire.
- 6) “Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings,…” “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” A. S. Byatt. The story doesn’t quite live up to that opening, but it’s good. I keep meaning to write a blog post riffing off part of that quote, and not getting around to it.
- 7) “On the day of the dead when the year too dies/ Must the youngest open the oldest hills/ Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.” The quote is the basis for the plot of The Grey King by Susan Cooper, but it appears in most of the books of the The Dark is Rising series. Nobody writes better prophetic doggerel.
- 8) “Now if thou wilt confess thy sins unto me and accept me as thy Savior, thou wilt be born again of water and of the Spirit and dwell in Paradise, a small town in Utah.” Blackburn, Bradley Denton. Maybe the best sympathetic serial killer novel I’ve ever read. The Prophet Morton is great fun.
- 9) “You know from the first Cinemascope frame…” “Troy: The Movie,” John M. Ford. I copied it from From the End of the Twentieth Century, but you can also find it online.
- 10) “… The physicists were studying the beginning, so they rushed to describe or bring about the end.” As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem. A terrific little book about love, obsession, and academia.
- 11) “…He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted.” “Magic for Beginners,” Kelly Link (from the collection of the same name). A terrific collection of slightly surreal short stories.
- 12) “I’ll buy you all kinds of chew toys– a squeaky duck if you want.” “I’m sorry, Tommy, but I can’t turn into a wolf.” Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, Christopher Moore. The title pretty much says it all.
- 13) “Try to think of it as an Experience, like something Winnie the Pooh might get involved in; Floating in Space while Awaiting Rescue. Like that.” The Long Run, Daniel Keys Moran. It’s a pity he’s a Difficult author, because this book is such great fun.
- 14) “But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid– that had to mean something.” The Silent Gondoliers, S. Morgenstern. The first work in English by the great Florinese author.
- 15) “Can you name the six noble gases?…” The Moon’s Fire-Eating Daughter, John Myers Myers. I used this on the dedication page of my Ph.D. thesis on collisions in metastable xenon. The book itself isn’t that great, but it’s hard to find good lines from literature mentioning xenon.
- 16) “Sages, seers, and theoretical physicists could only speculate at what, if any, relationship might exist between the Shanghai Police Departmet’s astonishing scope of activities and actual law enforcement.” The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson. It kind of goes off the rails at the end, but there’s some great stuff in the beginning.
- 17) “You took fifty G outta the Watergate? That’s no third-rate burglary.” What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, Donald E. Westlake. Probably the best of the Dortmunder books. Somebody really ought to think about making a movie of it.