What's So Funny? Quotes

“Well, you might not think it to look at me,” Dortmunder told him, “but I got a family crest.” “Have you?” “Yeah. And it’s got a motto on it.” “I am anxious to hear this motto.” “Quid lucrum istic mihi est.” Mr. Hemlow squinted; the red-headed hawk in flight. “I’m afraid my Latin is insufficient for that.” “What’s in it for me,” Dortmunder translated.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“If he were any more crooked, you could open wine bottles with him.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you’ve handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don’t have to sweat it any more, you’ve taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“I Googled it all.” Dortmunder had heard of this; some other nosey parker way to mind everybody else’s business.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“Mr. Dortmunder, this is too good a story to just jump in and tell the end.” Dortmunder hated stories that were that good, but”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, “Seltzer, yeah, sounds good.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“And there it was, tilted up, a big, dark, bulky mass of metal, crawling with forensic team members like ants on a rotted eggplant.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“It was all over, in the immortal words of Charles Willeford, except the paperwork.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“The food in New England was part hard black and part soft white. Fortunately, they carried national brands of beer in the dark-brown-laminated, green-glass-globed, black-flounce-skirted-waitress imitation Klondike/Yukon something or other where they broke their journey, so starvation was held at bay.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“Also, neither Brady nor Nessa was the scholarly type; once you knew your numbers and your alphabet, school was, face it, a drag.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“All these pine trees, and all so gigantic. It was like driving through a magic forest in a fairy tale. Dortmunder had just thought of that fanciful idea when the limo rounded yet another spreading tree, and in front of them appeared what at first looked to be several truckloads of dark brown shingles dumped in a pile in a clearing in the forest, but which, on further study, proved to be a sprawling three-story wood-shingle house with dark green window frames and a dark green shingle roof, as though it were more plant than structure and had grown in this place. A broad veranda girdled the house, both inviting and secretive.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“Her route home was as certain as a bowling alley gutter”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“10 WHEN MAY GOT home from her job at the Safeway with the daily sack of groceries she felt was a perk her employers would have given her if they’d thought of it, the apartment was dark.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“The lobby was small and dark and looked like a carpet salesroom in a mausoleum.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“it said Capitalists & Immigrants Trust. So, somewhere along the line, somebody stopped liking that name and decided C&I International would go down smoother, though mean less. Maybe the capitalists and immigrants had stopped trusting.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

“Quid lucrum istic mihi est.”
― Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?