I REALLY want to read this book from ym FAVORITE author: "Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules"
by David Sedaris

[[Description: From the #1 bestselling author of "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" comes a collection of the short stories David Sedaris loves most. Containing the work of both contemporary and classic writers, "Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules," edited and introduced by Sedaris, gives his legions of fans a glimpse at the writing he finds inspiring - and helps them discover the truth about loneliness, hope, love, betrayal, and certain, but not all, monkeys. ]]

From Naked by David Sedaris -- "The Drama Bug" pgs 97-98

" ... I undertook a campaign to reintroduce Elizabethan English to the citizens of North Carolina.
"Perchance, fair lady, thou dost think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters," I said to my mother as I ran the vacuum cleaner over the living-room carpet she was inherently too lazy to bother with. "These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered mat but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman? Were it a punishable crime to neglect thine dwellings, you, my feeble-spirited mistress, would hang from the tallest tree in penitence for your shameful ways. Be there not garments to launder and iron free of turbulence? See ye not the porcelain plates and hearty mugs waiting to be washed clean of evidence? Get thee to thine work, damnable lady, and quickly, before the products of thine very loins raise their collected fists in a spirit born both of rage and indignation, forcibly coaxing the last breath from the foul chamber of thine vain and upright throat. Go, now, wastrel, and get to it!"
My mother reacted as if I had whipped her with a short length of yarn. The intent was there, but the weapon was strange and inadequate...
... I took to brooding, refusing to let up until I received a copy of Shakespeare's collected plays. Once they were acquired, I discovered them dense and difficult to follow. Reading the words made me feel dull and stupid, but speaking them made me feel powerful. I found it best to simply carry the book from room to room, occasionally skimming for fun words I might toss into my ever fragrant vocabulary. The dinner hour became either unbearable or excruciating, depending on my mood.
"Methinks, kind sir, most gentle lady, fellow siblings all, that this barnyard fowl be most tasty and succulent, having simmered in its own sweet juices for such a time as it might take the sun to pass, rosy and full-fingered, across the plum-colored sky for the course of a twilight hour. 'Tis crisp yet juicy, this plump bird, satisfied in the company of such finely roasted neighbors. Hear me out, fine relations, and heed my words, for methinks it adventurous, and fanciful, too, to saddle mine fork with both fowl and carrot at the exact same time, the twin juices blending together in a delicate harmony which doth cajole and enliven mine tongue in a spirit of unbridled merriment! What say ye, fine father, sisters, and infant brother, too, that we raise our flagons high in celebration of this hearty feast, prepared lovingly and with utmost grace by this dutiful woman we have the good fortune to address as wife, wench, or mother!"
My enthusiasm knew no limits. Soon my mother was literally begging me to wait in the car while she stepped into the bank or grocery store. "


Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas
pg 10 He had been down roads to nowhere and alleys of sin. He had taken the high road and seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but only one stretch of pavement beckoned without respite - the only one leading away from home.

pg 17 The rest, as they say, is history, though in this particular case, it is literally so. If you want to read more, visit your local library. They'll be glad to help you.

pg 19 ... he didn't know what football players are like in a large Texas high school: one eye in the center of the forehead, hair on their backs, fangs.

pg 25 "If you could be any barnyard animal, what barnyard animal would you be?"
"Rooster," I answered, resisting my urge to use a synonym.

pg 28 We were wearing our homemade T-shirts freshly emblazoned with our club slogan. Go with GOD. Like 'I'm With Stupid' shirts, our uniforms included arrows. My arrow pointed toward Doug, assuming I could keep him on my left; Doug's pointed down toward... well, hell is where he said, though I think most of us would agree his crotch was the first whistle-stop on that journey.

pg 35 "Avalanche the ghost roper! Defy Mother Nature and her minions. Dadaists unite in secular purgatory, Pizza Hut, tomorrow night at six."

pg 39 "Sometimes... we sow seeds born of desperation and rage that, as older and wiser souls, we eventually regret." -- Jeff DeMouy

pg 62 Hence, the slogan "Grace Order of Dadaists says Pork" read more like "GOD says X".

pg 178 I smirked and whispered back, "Keep clapping, fools. One day all this will be mine!"

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

pg ## Number Two’s eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unresolved problem.

pg 99 ...learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly so - but not all the time which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about it.

pg 141 “Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.” - Marvin, chronically depressed robot.

Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

pg 97 "So you see," said Slartibartfast, slowly stirring his artificially constructed coffee, and thereby also stirring the whirlpool interfaces between real and unreal numbers, between the interactive perceptions of mind and universe, and thus generating the restructured matrices of implicitly enfolded subjectivity that allowed his ship to reshape the very concept of time and space, "how it is."

pg 108 "Look, where are we going?" said Ford, pushing his chair back from the table with impatience, "because I'm eager to get there."

pg 111 He started to speak. "..." is as far as he got.

pg 113 Time travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being polluted.
The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent as least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk.

pg 127 And it was equally clear that this person was, however unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.
In fact, it would be fair to say that he had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.


The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.”

pg 203-205 "How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"
...
"And they ask you," said Zarniwoop, "to make decisions for them? About people's lives, about worlds, about economics, about wars, about everything going on out there in the Universe?
"Out there?" said the man. "Out where?"
"Out there!" said Zarniwoop, pointing at the door.
"How can you tell there's anything out there?" said the man politely. "The door's closed."
...
"I only decide about my Universe," continued the man quietly. "My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay."
...
"You don't understand that what you decide in this shack of yours affects the lives and fates of millions of people? This is all monstrously wrong!" (Zarniwoop)
"I don't know. I've never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears." (the man)

pg 207 The ruler of the Universe dozed lightly in his chair. After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish by Douglas Adams

pgs 9-10 Splattered in his rearview mirror a couple of seconds later was the reflection of the hitchhiker, drenched by the roadside.
For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though."

pg 82 "You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace yourself."

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand

Valvert: You have a nose that... Your nose is... Um... very big...
Cyrano: My nose is enormous, you snub-nosed, flat-faced wretch! I carry it with pride, because a big nose is a sign of affability, kindness, courtesy, wit, generosity, and courage. I have all those qualities, but you can never hope to have any of them, since the ignoble face that my hand is about to meet above your collar has no more glory, nobility, poetry, quaintness, vivacity, or grandeur - no more nose, in short - ::slaps him:: ... you could have said ... oh, all sorts of things, varying your tone to fit your words. Let me give you a few examples. ... Solicitous: “Be careful when you walk: with all that weight on your head, you could easily lose your balance and fall.” ... Flippant: “That tusk must be convenient to hang your hat on.” ... Dramatic: “When it bleeds, it must be like the Red Sea!” ... There, now you have an inkling of what you might have said to me if you were witty & a man of letters. Unfortunately, you’re totally witless & a man of very few letters: only four that spell the word “fool”.

Cyrano-Christian to Roxane: “I could no more stop loving you than I could stop the rising of the sun. My cruel love has never ceased to grow in my tormented soul since the day when it was born there... but tonight it seems to me that I’m speaking to you for the first time... All those [words] that enter my mind of their own accord - I’ll give them to you as they come, without arranging them in bouquets: I love you, I’m overwhelmed, I love you to the point of madness! ... The feeling that holds me in its merciless grip could be nothing else but love! It has all the terrible jealousy and somber violence of love and all the unselfishness, too. How gladly I would give my happiness for the sake of yours, even without your knowledge, asking only to hear from a distance, now and then. ...”

The Duke (DeGuiche): “When a man has been too successful in life, even though he hasn’t done anything really wrong, he still has all sorts of reasons for feeling a little disgusted with himself. Their combined weight isn’t enough to form a burden of remorse, but he can never escape a kind of vague uneasiness. As he continues to climb toward even greater success, he hears dead illusions and old regrets rustling under his mantle...”

From my AP American book: The American Pageant by Kennedy, Cohen, & Bailey ((dude, this book has SO many good choice of words!))

pg 29 King James I 91566-1625) had scant enthusiasm for the Virginia experiment, partly because of his hatred of tobacco smoking, which had been introduced into the Old WOrld by the Spanish discoverers. In 1604 he publised the pamphlet A Counterblast to Tobacco:

"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit [Hades] that is bottomless."

pg 83 ((Melissa pointed out this one to me)) "But these efforts to reproduce the finely stratified societies of Europe proved feeble in the early American wilderness, where equality and democracy found fertile soil - at least for white people."

pg 143 "Hessian hirelings proved to be good soldiers in a mechanical sense, but many of them were more interested in booty than in duty."

pg 177 "But the poorer states' rights people pooh-poohed the talk of anarchy."

pg 212 "...and the country was left with an all-dressed-up-but-no-place-to-go feeling."

pg 263 "...scoundrels lusted for the spoils - rather than the toils - of office."

pg 201 - thomas paine vs. george washington backlash "And as to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and in the day of danger) and a hypocrtite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any."

pg 228 "The scholarly Madison was small of stature, light of weight, bald of head, and weak of voice."

pg 333 - "Among the longest-lived sects were the Shakers. Led by Mother Ann Lee, they began in the 1770s to set up the first of a score or so of religious communities. The Shakers attained a memebership of about six thousand in 1840, but since their monastic customs prohibited both marriage and sexual relations, they were virtually extinct by 1940."

pg 239 - Michael Scott (a lieutenant in the British navy) "I don't like Americans; I never did, and never shall I like them... I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with, or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole truth, nor fight with them, were it not for the laurels to be acquired, by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and in every way so worthy of one's steel, as they have always proved."

pg 276 - [Sam Houston] His life had been temporarily shattered in 1829 when his bride of a few weeks left him, and he took up transient residence with Arkansas Indians, who dubbed him "Big Drunk". He subsequently took the pledge of temperance."

pg 468 from a letter on a dead Confederate soldier "...it was 'dam fulishness' trying to 'lick shurmin.' He had been getting 'nuthin but hell & lots uv it' ever since he saw the 'dam yanks,' and he was 'tirde uv it.' He would head for home now, but his old horse was 'plaid out.' If the 'dam yankees' had not got there yet, it would be a 'dam wunder.' They were thicker then 'lise on a hen and a dam site ornerier.'"

passage from the play, Antigone by Sophocles

"O mother, your marriage-bed / the coiling horrors, the coupling there - / you with your own son, my father - doomstruck mother! / such, such were my parents, and I their wretched child. / I go to them now, cursed, unwed, to share their home - / I am a stranger! O dear brother, doomed / in your marriage - your marriage murders mine. / Your dying drags me down to death alive!" -- Antigone before she killed herself

(what it means... she's upset that her family is doomed. her mother had children with her son... making antigone her dad's sister... and also her daughter... well, anyway, she's doomed to die... - to marry Death - and to live where her parents are... in the underworld. yeah, well.. you just have to read the play. it's .... sorta.... cool. )

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:

pg 20 Darcy's change of mind: "But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, then he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by her easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware; - to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable no where, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with."

pg 47 Darcy looks at Lizzy : "Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that should should look at her because he disliked her, was still more strange. She could only imagine, however, at last, that she drew his notice because there was a something about her more wrong and rehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in any other person present."

pg 17 "Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are used synonimously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us." -- Mary Bennet

CHAPTER ONE from CHOKE by Chuck Palahniuk:

Of you're going to read this, don't bother.

After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.

Save yourself.

There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands. maybe you should take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.

You're not getting any younger.

from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

pg 197 "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitudes, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."