"I suspect this is all gonna end in screaming and drowning"
— Scott Lynch (Red Seas Under Red Skies)

"We had to go back to the coffeehouse: the Wreck was there. Mel had walked over. Well, I don’t know about walked. He had come over without vehicular assistance anyway."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist’s job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant. "
— Marlene Zuk (Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals)

"'Well, then,' said Peter, 'I guess we'll just have to find a cab.'

Peter said this in the manner of a cowboy telling the womenfolk that, because of the avalanche, they were going to have to take the pass through Indian country. In fact, as Holly and Peter both knew, nothing could have been easier than finding a free cab, for at this hour they flowed steadily down the avenue. But if Peter were to regain some face by wrangling one, the fiction had to be kept up that this would be a challenging task.

'Will you try?' Holly asked

'Sure,' said Peter. He stepped off the curb, raised his hand, and a taxi pulled up in front of them about five seconds later.

'Thank goodness!' Holly said.
"
— James Collins (Beginner's Greek : A Novel)

"Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"'If that is a three-piece suit, my image of you is going to be irrevocably shattered.'

Wordlessly, Dave unbuttoned his overcoat to reveal the shattering navy vest beneath.

'Angels and ministers of grace defend us!' Kevin exclaimed, crossing himself with the wrong hang while making the sign against evil with the other. Paul Schafer laughed. 'Actually,' Kevin said. 'It is nice. Why didn't you buy it in your size?'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"Dreamer of the dream, she now was, but there was much waiting involved and never, ever, had Kimberly been called a patient person."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'Come on, little brother!" someone shouted, and then Dave Martynuik thundered by, an axe of Brennin held high, a golden Prince racing beside him and thirty men behind."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'Twelve!' Cared and Erron shouted together from the bar top. The match had obviously been going on for some time. diarmuid tossed his tankard back to the serving girl while tegid hurled his over his shoulder; a patron ducked quickly and tipped over the table on which he and other men were standing. Had been standing.

It was too much for Kevin Laine.

A moment later the North Keep duo were quite inexcusably thrown to the grown by an attack from behind. It hadn't been subtle; they'd been simply run over. As the howls and screams rose to unprecendented levels, Kevin, mounted firmly on Dave's broad shouldes, turned to the pair from the Boar.

'Have at you!' he cried.

But Tegid had other ideas. With a howl of joy, he rushed, open-armed, toward Dave, grabbed him in a titanic bear hug, and, quite unable to do anything so complex as stop, toppled the four of them to the floor in a tangled, sodden heap."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"It seemed that nothing, really, could induce in Diarmuid a sense of responsibility. "
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'There's another thing,' Paul said. 'I don't need a jacket. The winter doesn't touch me. For what that's worth.'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"Battles are won en route, Shalhassan of Cathal though. A worthy thought: he raised his hand in a certain way, and a moment later Razeil galloped up, uneasy on a horse at speed, and the Supreme Lord of Cathal made him write it down."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"Escapades such as the one of the previous spring, when she had outraced his envoys to Paras Derval, could no longer be countenanced. He had never, in fact, received a wholly or even moderately satisfactory account of the affair. Not that he really expected one given with whom he was dealing."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"And Shalhassan of Cathal realized in that moment, standing between the fair brother and the dark, that he was not going to lead this war after all."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'Brightly woven, Diar,' Aileron said. And then dazzled them all with the warmth of his smile."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'I am served,' said Aileron, with a heavy emphasis, 'by advisers of limited capacities.'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'Shall we three hunt wolves of the Dark in Gwen Ystrat?'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"It was Aileron who saw the light blaze in Arthur's face. The Warrior leaped from his horse down into the road and, at the top of his great voice, cried 'Cavall!'

Bracing his legs, he opened wide his arms and was knocked flying, nonetheless, by the wild leap of the dog. Over and over they rolled, the dog yelping in intoxicated delight, the Warrior mock growling in his chest. . . .
'This is' asked Aileron with gentle irony, 'your dog?'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King's plans, we should meet Shalhassan's forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren't,' Diarmuid concluded, 'we blame anyone and everything except the plan.'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'If you so much as start to bow or anything like that, Dave, I'll beat you up. I swear I will.'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"'Praise be to the Weaver and all the gods!' said Shalhassan of Cathal. 'Finally she's done something adult!'"
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire)

"There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them."
— Guy Gavriel Kay (The Summer Tree)

"I sew his ears on from time to time, sure."
— Patrick O'Brian (Post Captain)

"‘Touch and away, Jack?’ asked Stephen. ‘Touch and away? Do you not recall that I have important business there? Enquiries of the very first interest?’

‘To do with our enterprise? To do with this voyage?’

‘Perhaps not quite directly.’"
— Patrick O'Brian (Blue at the Mizzen)

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. "
— Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer)

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth"
— Patrick O'Brian

"But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile."
— Patrick O'Brian

"They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack's opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic'd bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-cosy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.
Jack took off his coat, covered his waistcoat and breeches with an apron, and carried the dishes into the scullery. 'My plate and saucer will serve again,' said Stephen. 'I have blown upon them. I do wish, Jack,' he cried, 'that you would leave that milk-saucepan alone. It is perfectly clean. What more sanitary, what more wholesome, than scalded milk?'"
— Patrick O'Brian (Post Captain)

"‘Go and see whether the Doctor is about,’ said Jack, ‘and if he is, ask him to look in, when he has a moment.’
‘Which he is in the fish-market, turning over some old-fashioned lobsters. No. I tell a lie. That is him, falling down the companion-way and cursing in foreign.’"
— Patrick O'Brian (Blue at the Mizzen)

"Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Show some fucking adaptability!"
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window."
— Neal Stephenson

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since."
— Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof Fraa Bly' and start believing in God."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem."
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

"When the day shall come that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time."
— Diana Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross)

"Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eigh­teenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men. "
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

"No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly."
— Diana Gabaldon (Outlander)

"While the Lord might insist that vengeance was His, no male Highlander of my acquaintance had ever thought it right that the Lord should be left to handle such things without assistance."
— Diana Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross)

"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
— Dave Barry

"I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
— Dave Barry

"Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? "
— Dave Barry

"Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear."
— Dave Barry

"If you were to open up a baby's head -- and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should -- you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland."
— Dave Barry

"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base."
— Dave Barry

"Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print."
— Dave Barry