"Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas."
— Ian Fleming (Casino Royale)

"It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would
occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing
with the same set of facts. -Bill Vaughan, journalist (1915-1977)"
— Bill Vaughan

""...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.""
— Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)

"For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury. "
— Bill Gaede (Why God Doesn't Exist)

"Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats--"Who's that trip-tapping across my bridge!?"--and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your relatives would make you insane than some random hooved mammal, however ecologically destructive it might be. What if trolls evolved from goats? Or, no, better yet, what if goats evolved from trolls? Or were domesticated from trolls by human shepherds? And the trolls despise their domesticated cousins as a disgrace to the once-proud troll race, (much as I assume wolves would despise Chihuahuas if they ever gave them much thought) and eat them at every opportunity."
— Ursula Vernon

"Every family's its own trip to China."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer: A Novel)

"Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool."
— Laura Kalpakian (Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family)

"If blue helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run."
— Andrew Thomson (Emergency Sex)

"They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.
It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.
"
— Arundhati Roy Choudhury

"Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still."
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)