Tiger Shrimp Tango Quotes

“...And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps... You'll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, 'I recently read where--' and they'll cut you off and say, 'Oh, I don't read'... This is a tragedy on so many different levels. First, because they don't read, they don't know enough to keep it to themselves. Next, and this is the most amazing part, they use a demeaning tone like I'm the stupid one for wasting time with books.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.” “You aren’t?” asked Coleman. “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“It would have been the middle of nowhere if it had been closer to other places.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“She blew her nose like a British ambulance, and her sob story had more twists than a dragon parade in Chinatown.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps,” said Serge. “You’ll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, ‘I recently read where—’ and they’ll cut you off and say, ‘Oh, I don’t read’ . . . This is a tragedy on so many different levels. First, because they don’t read, they don’t know enough to keep it to themselves.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“How do you eat tofu?” “Scoop it with Doritos,”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“There’s only one thing holding America back from realizing her full glory. Ready? You want to write this down? No? Okay, here it is: We need to stop taking ourselves so seriously.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Technology has just passed our survival instinct, and the country is spinning on a stationary existential axis of make-believe importance: We text about a Tweet of a YouTube video posted on Facebook with a clip of Glee about not texting that we just texted about. Instead of actual life, we’re now living an air-guitar version of life.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Car insurance,” said Serge. “Watch any channel on TV for any length of time, and every other commercial is a British lizard, an upwardly mobile caveman, a calcified chick named Flo, the anthropomorphic jerk named Mayhem who tricks you into accidents, the guy in a hard hat who hits cars with sledgehammers, the character who played the president in the show 24 saying, ‘That’s Allstate’s stand,’ ‘Nationwide is on your side,’ ‘Fifteen minutes could save you some shit.’ ” “I like Mayhem,” said Coleman. “He makes me not feel so bad about breaking stuff.” “And yet we’re still not manufacturing anything you can hold in your hands,” said Serge.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Here’s the part that’s off the hook! Say you’re at a bash, and some dude wants a drink, and you say, ‘I’ll get it. Is rum and Coke good?’ He says, ‘Goddamn right.’ And you go in the kitchen giggling and make the drink. And you drop these ice cubes in the glass, except they’re not normal ice cubes. They’re the ones where you froze half, stuck a Mentos in the middle, then froze the other half on top of it. But the guy’s not going to see the Mentos in the middle of the cubes because rum and Coke is dark, and you hand the drink to him while he’s talking up some chick. And a few minutes later when the cubes melt . . .” Coleman waved both arms in the air. “Bloooooshhhhhh! Foam exploding everywhere, all over the guy’s clothes, up his nose, in his eyes, and all over the pissed-off chick, who’s definitely not going to fuck him now.” “So Mentos can also be used for birth control.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“You know what the worst customer service in the world is? I’ll tell you. It’s the weed guys. You just cannot depend on these people. They’ll give you a time, right? And you’re looking forward to it all week and get off work on Friday at five. Of course I personally wouldn’t know, but I’ve heard of people with jobs. And the weed guy never shows up, and he doesn’t answer his phone, and you drive by his house and his car’s gone, and then you’re totally un-stoned at midnight and accidentally bump into the guy at a party and go, ‘Dude, what’s the deal? We had a time,’ and he says, ‘I was doin’ stuff,’ and I say, ‘Like what?’ and he says, ‘Listenin’ to music’ . . .” “Coleman—”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“You never get over something like that. You just try to keep it in a box on an out-of-the-way shelf in your brain. But then you open the closet to look for an old sousaphone—”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Take the Tea Party. I get it. They’re a playground team with staunch work ethics and sincere values, and they’re sick of watching all these lazy, political clowns throw away their hard-earned tax dollars. On the other hand are the Occupiers, the other playground team who’s furious that the top one percent hire a bunch of lobbyists to bribe those same clowns and tilt the chessboard.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“But how do you plan to convince everyone we’re on the same side?” “Instead of being slaves to our toxic emotional times, we harness that outrage,” said Serge. “So we just change the national slogan from ‘Land of the Free’ to ‘Fuck Canada.’ ” Coleman nodded. “I think everyone can get behind that.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“I’ve decided to totally rededicate my entire life to being a private eye. Your life, too.” “Is this like all your other rededications?” “No!” Serge pounded his fist on the dash. “Those were all spur-of-the-moment impulsive flights of silliness. Like my last idiotic idea of becoming a house hunter. Where’s the challenge?”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“State Road 60 is one of those great old Florida drives. From Tampa on the west coast to Vero Beach on the east, rolling through Mulberry and Bartow and Yeehaw Junction. Phosphate mines and orange groves and cows loitering near water holes in vast open flats dotted with sabal palms, stretching for miles, making the sky big. Here and there were the kind of occasional, isolated farmhouses that made people subconsciously think: Do they get Internet? In the middle of one overgrown field stood a single concrete wall, several stories high, covered with grime and mildew, the ancient ruins of a drive-in theater. The top of the wall was the last thing to catch a warm glow from the setting sun.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Most people walk through life without ever noticing the little clues all around that something’s not right.” Another toilet lid crashed in front of them and Serge pulled a porcelain splinter from his arm. “In Florida, you just have to filter out the background weirdness.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“But instead they tell you they’ll come to fix your cable between noon and five, and I say, okay, I’ll pay my next bill between July and November, but they don’t laugh.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango

“Our political process appears to be a toxic dance of mutually assured destruction that takes all the citizens down with you, and that can’t be right. So I’ve prepared a little experiment.”
― Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango