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It’s cold and poor and if you don’t die from falling in a hole or starving to death, a wolf eats you.
(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)
(I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)
In some ways, it is rather refreshing to be treated in the same way as a fungus, though I might have felt differently if she insisted on taking spore prints or seeing what color I bruised.
I mentioned that we were a fierce warrior people, right? Even though we were bad at it?
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.
although they carve flowers on their shutters here and we carve turnips. (That is a general we. I have never carved a turnip in my life.)
And you can’t exactly threaten to shoot someone to save their life. Angus would be extremely sarcastic if I tried.
It must have been terribly galling to be barred from an organization merely because one lacked the proper genitals, when disreputable Americans were allowed to join and write about underwater mushrooms.
“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.” “I thought He’d sent you.” “You’re a two-person job, youngster.”
“Great blistering Christ, of course not. D’ye take me for an idjit?”
(Mozart? Beethoven? Why are you asking me? It was music, it went dun-dun-dun-DUN, what more do you want me to say?)
It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.
No one actually likes it, but it is traditionally made by widows as a means of supporting themselves, so everyone drinks it because you can’t let little old ladies starve to death when they could be climbing mountains and scraping lichen off rocks instead.
He was never going to be a career soldier, but that’s fine. Not everyone should be. Ideally nobody would have to be, but that’s a bigger problem than I could tackle today.
(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)
His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are.
It was terrible, but a hangover seemed like a great idea. Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.
Denton was even more American than usual. If his accent got any broader, he was going to start singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and shaking hands with the tablecloth.
Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things.
It sent up a puff of dust and probably mold spores, but really, what was one more set at this point?
Denton sounded amused, but I recognized it as the humor that men get when they see the line of cannons pulled into position. Ha, yes, of course the enemy has cannons, why wouldn’t they? Oh, and we’re out of bullets, you say? Ha!
My back screamed at me that I was no longer young and I would pay the price. Later, I told it. Later I can fall apart from the knees on up.
