A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

Her logic was a combination of half-truths and clichés, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

(Myrna was decidedly masochistic. She was only happy when a police dog was sinking its fangs into her black leotards or when she was being dragged feet first down stone steps from a Senate hearing.)

Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron.

“Mother! Is this offensive display of ill manners one of the results of your association with those bowling Sicilians?”

You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.”

thinking, no doubt, that a few cents cast my way would be a vote of confidence for the welfare state.