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"Still, it does get on my nerves how easy it is for tall people to make a good first impression." Vowell on complimentary accounts of George Washington

"This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter."

"The rustic gloom of Chateau de Chavaniac is a Woody Guthrie song compared to the Liberace concert that is the Chateau de Versailles." - Vowell continues to hate on Versailles

"the morally and architecturally bankrupt compendium of gilded nonsense and silken flimflam" Vowell describes the palace of Versailles, her "least favorite building on earth."

"...he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief."

"I give over fifteen years of my life to climbing a two-mile pile of garbage, I can spare a few hours for three feet of genius."

"It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve."

"...explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them."

Glad to be out of the 300s. 3s and 5s look the same in this page number font.

As a gay Jew in NYC, I can't believe it's taken me this long to read this book.

"Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake."

"Every fifteen minutes, Kornblum consulted his wristwatch, the intervals so regular and precise as to render the gesture superfluous."

https://www.instagram.com/p/BC5_nhlS2pJ/

"Diaphanous pink negligees are their own excuse for being."

First rule of Urban Bloodshed Limitation: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

I like that the story is being told alternately by the narrator, via conversation between two characters, and in a story time setting from one character to a group. In general, alternating narrators is an easy way to please me.

"Please stop singing."

"She's surprised she doesn't feel squeamish; she might have, once, back when squeamish was an option."

"'Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.'" Oh my.

"She sat at the base of The Thinker until the comic irony of the scene drove her back indoors to the Café Chanticleer."

Brian: "Gay guys don't have fat asses?"
Michael: "If they do, they don't go to bars. That's the other Code of the Seventies."
Things have changed since the seventies.

The author takes the position that Sarah Palin was mocked by the media for purporting that Russia is visible from Alaska, whereas she was actually mocked because she believed this fact translated to foreign policy experience.

"I'm caught in a Mark Twain shame-spiral."

"Recognizing that popularity is sometimes the equivalent of human mange sort of cured me from wanting it."

foxen

"I'm not actually sure if it's ironic or not. That Alanis Morissette song sort of fucked up irony for everyone."

"I'm not actually sure if it's ironic or not. That Alanis Morissette song sort of fucked up irony for everyone."

"It's nice to have a pen pal I don't have to write back to." - on leaving herself notes
"Don't just be some random person. Be the MOST random person." - revising the call to express yourself by being unique.

"There was nothing offensive in this love. That is to say, it wasn't homosexual." - Vonnegut, a product of his time, gives us the 1950's version of "no homo."

This book is full of jerks.