The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society Quotes

“You’d think that they’d at least teach you the basics,” Sherry said, feeling aggrieved with the Catholic Church all over again. As if there weren’t enough wrong with them, they had to bogart all the anti-demon trainings. At the moment she’d give almost anything for a nice, modern, Unitarian Universalist exorcist. The Unitarian exorcist would probably be a Montessori school administrator with a master’s degree in social work with a focus in cross-cultural sensitivity in evil-spirit extraction. “You don’t have to be a doctor of demonology, but they could at least have given you the hour-long CPR certification course version, just in case there’s an emergency.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“It really was annoying, she thought, when the job for which she’d been formally trained and which she was paid to perform by the local government got in the way of her unpaid amateur homicide detection.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon Hunting Society: The funny supernatural mystery, perfect cosy Halloween reading for spooky season

“Have you seen The Exorcist?”
“Um,” Sherry said. She wasn’t sure whether it was best to tell the truth or to lie when discussing popular movies with a possibly demonic individual calling himself Lucifer. She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t more frightened. Maybe she’d worked all her terror out the night before. “I read the book,” she said finally. It was the truth. She hoped that Lucifer wouldn’t be disappointed.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“I do trust that God won’t give me anything that I can’t handle, but I definitely wasn’t hoping for demons. It just … looks like it might be demons.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon Hunting Society: The funny supernatural mystery, perfect cosy Halloween reading for spooky season

“She was the sort of person who demanded adverbs: she never walked when she could stride briskly, and Sherry had never known her to whisper when she could instead confidently declare.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Sherry took her time in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil and then for the tea to steep. She found milk and sugar and containers for them, and then plates and some cookies. Oreos. The Oreos felt somehow out of place in this particular scene, like a boom mike drifting into the shot.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“For Chloe and Emily, because friends will help you move, good friends will help you move a body, but best friends will badger you into taking a nap, going on a walk, and drinking a glass of water before you snap and commit felony homicide in the first place.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Father Barry sometimes texted her memes, which she always found funny even when she didn’t get the joke, because a priest sending memes reminded her of the time she’d seen a small dog in Manhattan wearing four tiny red leather shoes.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Should I call Lord Thomas Cromwell?” Sherry asked, feeling very clever, “or your true name?” The cat’s voice changed then. The silly TV-movie-Tudor voice disappeared. Its voice now was a hiss and a meow, a mouse’s dying squeak and the rustle of tall grasses. “You may not have my true name, mistress,” it said. “But call me with intent, and I will come. Farewell to you, Mistress Pinkwhistle, giver of tuna cans, scratcher of ears, opener of the kitchen door to release me from my bondage.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Sherry watched, fascinated. She’d always found it remarkable to see how attractive people seemed to have a sort of secret password that let them pass directly through the parts of socializing that involved trying to convince people that you were worth speaking to and move directly on to the fun parts. It reminded her of how very young children made friends by asking another child if they’d like to be friends.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Excuse me,” Father Barry said, and then cleared his throat. “Um. In the name of—Christ. I…abjure you!” The buzzing eased for a moment, and Sherry hacked a few times and spit out a fly. It had only been one, maybe, which had felt like a whole lot of them. The flies, when they spoke, sounded affronted. “You abjure us? In the name of Christ?” “Yes,” Father Barry said, a bit more firmly this time. Then he said, “Take that!” and some water splashed against Sherry’s face. “Why are you splashing water around?” the flies asked. They sounded genuinely baffled this time.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“She’d married the first one who did notice her right after high school, and then regretted it almost immediately. His noticing her, it seemed, only lasted as long as it took for him to install her in the little house at 184 Coconut Grove so that he would have someone to iron his shirts for him.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Diverse in his interests,” Charlotte repeated. “That sounds like one of those old euphemisms. He appreciates Grecian marbles.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“How would you kill someone?” Sherry asked, curious. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. On TV, pushing people down the stairs works really well to avoid suspicion, but on TV, everyone seems to fall down a few steps and then die instantly. In real life I think they’re more likely to just sprain their wrist or something, unless they’re about ninety years old. You’d probably have to push them down the stairs once a day for a month until you got lucky and they banged their head at the right angle, and that would definitely look suspicious. Or I thought about hiring a hit man, but then you have to rely on the guy you hire not being either completely incompetent or an undercover FBI agent. Really, I think the best way to kill someone and get away with it is to buy an unlicensed gun from a criminal, wear gloves while you shoot a stranger in the middle of the night, and then throw the gun into the Hudson. It would have to be a stranger because as soon as you have a decent motive, you’re a suspect. But I wouldn’t have any reason to want to kill a stranger, so now there’s no point to killing someone in the first place. You might as well skip the whole thing.” “You have thought about this,” Sherry said, impressed.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“It was so much easier to be stubbornly independent when it was nice outside. It was so much easier to desperately miss someone when you lived alone.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Lord Thomas came to wind around her ankles and purr. She eyed him suspiciously and hated that she felt suspicious of a creature who lived in fear of the vacuum cleaner.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“When she checked out, the youth and disinterested politeness of the pimply teenager at the register nearly made her cry. It would be nice, she thought, to be a pimply teenage girl who worked at a supermarket and hadn’t yet had the chance to do a dozen things that she would regret for the next thirty years.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Oh, these look interesting,” she said encouragingly. She always felt a sort of kinship with small children who checked out big dry books on the sorts of topics that peculiar, uncoordinated children tended to be interested in, like wild horses and dinosaurs and ancient Rome.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Indeed,” said the cat, and stretched one of his front legs forward and pointed his nose toward the ground as if he was maybe planning on grooming his belly. It took her a moment to realize that he was trying to bow. “I am at your service, Mistress Pinkwhistle.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Sherry decided against asking whether or not she had that old-lady voice. She didn’t think she did. She wondered whether most women noticed when they started developing it, or if they sounded to themselves exactly like they always had.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“I don’t think that Lord Thomas is trying to kill me, exactly,” Sherry said, in the spirit of fair play. “Mostly he’s just tried to boss me around and get me to open cans for him in exchange for telling me secrets, which isn’t that different from how cats usually act. But I don’t want him listening in on my conversations.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“There was, she thought, not very much difference in the behavior of a cat and a high-handed, chauvinistic Tudor autodidact in the body of a cat. The only thing to truly set them apart was the vocabulary.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Sherry was getting the sense that this Lord of Cats wasn’t taking any of this very seriously, which she supposed was exactly what you would expect from a Lord of Cats, when she thought about it.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Prithee, sir,” Sherry said, “that sounds like you just made it up.” The cat puffed up his tail at her. “Of course it’s made up,” he said. “As are all things that matter. If you and I stood before a priest and asked to be married now, we would be refused, but had I the shape of a man, the priest could say a few words and bind us unto eternity in the eyes of all laws on earth and heaven. What aspect of that is not made up? My form and yours, the words, earthly law? Belief, all of it. Adherence to convention. A convention much younger than I am, woman, and laws that were made when she was already older than most rivers. She hews to more ancient laws. And so must you, Mistress Pinkwhistle, if you hope to have the best of her.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“At the moment she’d give almost anything for a nice, modern, Unitarian Universalist exorcist. The Unitarian exorcist would probably be a Montessori school administrator with a master’s degree in social work with a focus in cross-cultural sensitivity in evil-spirit extraction.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“I just, uh. I never took that seminar.” She blinked at him. “What?” “It’s a special seminar,” he said. Now he was blushing, and practically whispering, as if they were talking about some kind of exotic sexual practice that required you to custom-order the necessary equipment from a single specialty manufacturer in Baden-Württemberg. “At the Vatican.” “A seminar for what?” Sherry asked, thoroughly baffled. Then it clicked. “Demon problems?” “You know,” Father Barry said, and really did whisper this time. “Exorcisms.” “There’s a seminar?”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“It was difficult for Sherry not to feel very authentically detective-y as she set to her task. She imagined that she ought to be drinking an enormous amount of black coffee, possibly while speaking Swedish.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“A young girl had recently called Sherry adorable, and Sherry had decided to take it as a compliment. Maybe she was adorable. She’d recently seen a segment on the evening news about some panda bears at the Boston Zoo that had featured one of them rolling placidly down a gentle slope. It had been extremely adorable. There could be worse things in life than to resemble that panda bear.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Altogether, Alan was the human equivalent of a subscription to the New Yorker. Her thinking that would mortify poor Alan, of course. He wasn’t a snob; he was the sort of earnest, kindhearted, well-to-do liberal who seemed to truly feel terrible about all his money.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

“Alan, absurdly, was Sherry’s…she wasn’t sure, really. The word boyfriend was too ridiculous, and lover would be inaccurate. Gentleman friend, maybe. Alan didn’t seem to mind that she was keeping things to the occasional brief kiss after many months of dating. He bought her dinner once a week, and they drank wine and talked about books together, and she never once had to pick up his socks. It was perfect.”
― C.M. Waggoner, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society