Andrew > Recent Status Updates

"...the sort of growl that starts in the back of one throat and ends up in someone else's."

Demon: Listen, how many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean.
Angel: Well, I should think-
Demon: Two. Elgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine an eternity with Elgar?
Angel: All too easily.

"Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you."

I wonder how much Atwood's philosophy intersects with the God's Gardeners. She certainly seems to know a lot about conservation, yet she lambasts them.

"...said Pilar: the bees were on good terms with the unseen world, being the messengers to the dead. She tossed that crazed little factoid off as if it was something everyone knew, and Toby pretended to ignore it."

"There used to be an arm hanging out of the window, but it's gone now." Oh, Atwood.

This portrayal of six-year-old boys is the most believable portrayal of nine-year-old boys I've ever read.

Leslie Kneep

"I'm just crying because of how wrong you are."

"Don't ask for permission to sit on George Clooney's lap, beg for forgiveness once you do."

"Don't cry, sexy."

Most likely giving this five stars unless something goes horribly wrong in the next few pages.

"No, not downhill. Any idiot can be hauled like a garbage can up a mountain just so he can let gravity slide him down." - Viktor, a cross-country skier

Gettin' Pythagorean up in here.

I've gotten far enough in this book that the cover makes me smile.

"'Look, look... That face like an eggplant, Italian. Look carefully. That face like a ripe apple, Irish. That face like a potato, Ukrainian.' The fruits and vegetables of my childhood were transformed into a United Nations through my mother's lessons."

"'A mensch tracht un Gott lacht.' You can make all the plans in the world, but God will fuck them up and be happy about it."

"...to ignore math in this story would be akin to listening to Frank Zappa without ever having taken hallucinogens, an incomplete experience."

"She had been banned from teaching calculus at her university simply because she scared the hell out of freshmen."

"It took a lot of trial and error and we're still testing, but I think we've managed to do away with jokes."

"'He loves young people. He's turning into a teenager himself.'"

Reading this book while in the middle of Oryx and Crake is an odd experience. Both are set vaguely (but not far) in the future, and both are bleak.

I've temporarily misplaced the book I was reading, so I'm reading this in the mean time.

"He didn't strike Jimmy as a team player, or one who would stupidly court injury. tennis, maybe."

In 2003, Atwood's vision of the future included "disks" and "CD-ROMs."

"I'll never remember all that. I'll just call you Ronald and Nancy."

"It was the established technique of heading for where you didn't want to go that allowed you to end up, quite by accident, in the area where you did."

"We are eager to interrogate a Prince who was absurd in the area shortly after." DI Dogberry, quoted in the Elsinore Tatler

Dr. Quatt: Did you know that I have successfully grafted a kitten's had on to a haddock?
Det. Spratt: Should you be telling me this?

I may need to brush up on my nursery rhymes.