Nina was conducting her comme il faut class. "Be careful who takes you to Ascot," she said, "because unless you have married a rich husband, he is probably a crook. Even if he's your husband, well ... Not many honest men can take four days off their work, dress themselves in a black suit and a silk hat with all the accoutrements, and lose a lot of money on the horses, and take you out afterward or join a party of people like him. For Ascot you will need warm underwear in case it's cold. You can wear a flimsy dress on top. But your man is bound to be a crook, bound to be. It teems with crooks ..."

Muriel Spark, The Finishing School (109-110)

It was Sambuca, though Bradley could barely focus on his face. The world was gray and faint. But he saw that Sambuca was grinning at him, revealing a row of yellow pointed teeth. And then Sambuca held up a knife so Ted could see it, and smiled again, and with two fingers grabbed the flesh of Ted's cheek and sliced it off with the knife.

Michael Crichton, State of Fear (533)

We have the pots, jewelry, and wall decorations of our ancient ancestors, and a few of their stories. We know nothing of the joys and sorrows of their family lives and care little for their political intrigues. Their faiths have disappeared or changed utterly; their science has been superceded. The things that mattered most to them have vanished. What remains is the superficial. It is how we know them. And when we too are dust, our descendants will have Rashid's curvy plastic trash cans.

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style (191)

The entire repertory company went through a profound shock when David Lochary died in New York from complications of an angel dust overdose. David had never had a drug problerm until he discovered "dust," and for some reason he lost control. To this day I'm in favor of busting dealers who sell this crap. So if you're on the stuff, don't come around me, because I might call the police. David's death stunned Dreamland and made us realize a whole era in our lives had abruptly ended. At his wake we discussed the major influence David had had on our style and attitudes, and I knew that without my favorite leading man I had no choice but to make a film with all women stars.

John Waters, Shock Value (160)

Dwell's editor in chief preaches a pluralism that would sound strange to her forebears: "We think of ourselves as Modernists, but we are the nice Modernists. One of the things we like best about Modernism - the nice Modernism - it its flexbility." She tweaks the puritanical doctrines of Adolf Loos - "one crabby Modernist" - whose influential 1908 essay "Ornament and Crime" proclaimed decoration degenerate, the amoral indulgence of children and barbarians. To a contemporary reader, Loos sounds like a racist, pleasure-hating totalitarian. In the twenty-first century, ornament is not a crime. It is an essential form of human self-expression.

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style (14)

But if you think about it, Santa Claus is directly responsible for heroin addiction. Innocent children are brainwashed into believing the first big lie their parents ever tell them, and when the truth finally hits, they never believe them again. All the stern warnings on the perils of drugs carry the same credibility as flying reindeer or fat men in your chimney. But I love Santa Claus anyway: All legends have feet of clay. Besides, he's a boon to the unemployed. Where else can drunks and fat people get temporary work? And if you're a child molester - eureka! the perfect job: clutching youngsters' fannies and chuckling away, all the while knowing what you'd like to give them.

John Waters, Crackpot (117)

Considering how often people in America inquire about the ethnic backgrounds of people they've just met, and considering that a kiss-me-I'm-Irish name like Hollahan invites the question, D.J. would have conversations like this over and over again all his adult life. He would come to hate us for for giving him such a green-beer-and-shamrocks last name. There were a couple of other family-name possibilities - Keenan, my middle name and also my other grandmother's maiden name; and Bunbaker, Terry's mother's maiden name. But Keenan presented the same "So you must be Irish" problem as Hollahan, and a name like Bunbaker could get a kid beaten up on the playground daily through grade school. With two gay dads and the name "D.J. Bunbaker," he would never get out of junior high alive. We might as well name him Liberace.

Dan Savage, The Kid (205)

All kinds of films could benefit. The producers of Porky's et al., pretend their films aren't made for dirty, filthy twelve-year-old lechers, but why not be honest and sponsor a circle-jerk for Cub Scout troops with the winner receiving a call girl for the night? If you want to be civic minded and publicize your newly installed handicap ramps, show The Crippled Masters, an honest-to-God karate film with two heroes - one has no arms, the other no legs. Everybody beats them up until one jumps on the other's shoulders, and together they become a killing machine.

John Waters, Crackpot (22)

Waters' relationship with Montgomery was disintegrating, and she returned to Baltimore halfway through the summer. He moved in with Sique, who lived in a tree fort owned by Prescott Townsden. The tree house had no roof or running water, and trees grew up out of the living room floor. The fort was partly made from an old submarine suspended in branches of a large oak. There were seperate units, connected by gangplanks and reached by a rope ladder. Waters lived in one "apartment" with Sique and her friend Flo; Mink lived in another with Channing Wilroy, a friend from Baltimore whom Waters had admired when Wilroy was a regular on The Buddy Deane Show, Baltimore's version of American Bandstand.

Robrt L. Pela, Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters (31)

Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them. But, you say, doesn't that fabulous statuary look so right over by the door? It's an ancient Belgian God of Fertility or something. You can hang hats on the erection. Or use it for umbrellas! That's not the point. Most people don't want to encounter this sort of thing right away, if ever. Especially one that's been handpainted in such a unique fashion. Put it in the spare bedroom; it'll keep houseguests from lingering.

James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s (20)

This is why God made alcohol. Though plenty of people, the guests at Bentham's, maybe Len - and Sherrie, for all he knows - probably think Swenson has had a drinking problem for quite some time, Swenson disagrees. But now is when a drinking problem would solve a lot of more serious problems. This is the moment for which God created drinking problems. Swenson watches the cases of wine empty, wrapping the world around him in Styrofoam, cushioning voices and objects as if for the shock of a move, a spongy buffer zone between Swenson and his life. Alcohol keeps him numb and paradoxically energized with an oddly pleasurable anger: white noise that drowns out the dangerous whispers of pain and fear and sorrow.

Francine Prose, Blue Angel (257-258)

Luckily, Lesbian Couple was angrier with Lesbian Single than they were with me. Lesbian Couple had let it be known on the Lesbian Grapevine that they had approached me about my sperm. Apparently, Lesbian Single knew they had dibs on my balls and had approached me anyway, fully aware that my balls had been spoken for. Add to this psychodrama the fact that Lesbian Single had once attempted to seduce half of Lesbian Couple away from the other half, and soon we were having meetings to process our anger and hurt feelings around those secondary issues, which delayed any further progress on processing our feelings around the primary issue, which was, as I understood it, the production of a human infant sometime before all three lesbians hit menopause.

Dan Savage, The Kid (31)

A few steps from the top, Swenson's able to read the title of her paperback, which is not, as he expected, the work of some trendy child author, but rather, Jane Eyre. She grasps the novel with talons lacquered eggplant purple, curling from fingerless black leather gloves studded with silver grommets. Her tiny hands - or perhaps their proximity to Charlotte Bronte's novel - give the gloves a prim Victorian decorousness. Otherwise her outfit is pure sci-fi unisex shitkicker. A streaked green and orange ponytail, spraying straight up from the top of her head, makes her look like a garish tasseled party favor.

Francine Prose, Blue Angel (33)

While much effort has been expended in the third world countries educating women into a range of options that does not limit their role merely to bearing children, well-off, educated, and indulgent American women are clamoring for babies, babies, BABIES to complete their status. They've had it all, and now they want a baby. And women over thirty-five want them NOW. They're the ones who opt for the aggressive fertility route; they're impatient; they're sick of being laissez-faire about this. Sex seems such a laborious way to go about it. At this point they don't want to endure all that intercourse over and over and maybe get no baby. What a waste of time! And time's awasting. A life with no child would be a life perfecting hedonism, a forty-something infertile woman said, now the proud owner of pricey twins. Even women who have the grace to submit to fate can sound wistful. It's not so much that I wish that I had children now, a travel writer said, but that I wish I had had them. I hate to fail at anything. Women are supposed to wish and want and not fail.

Joy Williams, "The Case Against Babies," from Ill Nature (94-95)

The work of a moment. And now, tonight, while Terence gamely grunts, while Miranda cracks him in her dappled thighs: I'll be up here chuckling about the things I didn't tell him, about her raw-liver kisses and her sweet-sherry tongue, about the ghostly smells that issue from her pouches and vents, about the underworld effluvia she leaves glistening on your sheets.

Martin Amis, Success (17)

The mania for speculation broke loose. Stock soared in three months from 128 to 300, and within a few months more to 500. Amid the resounding cries of jobbers and speculators a multitude of companies, some genuine and some bogus, was hatched. By June 1721 the South Sea stock stood at 1050. Robert Walpole himself had the luck to make a handsome profit on his quiet investments. At every coffeehouse in London men and women were investing their savings in any enterprise that would take their money. There was no limit to the credulity of the public. One promoter floated a company to manufacture an invention known as Puckle's Machine Gun, "which was to discharge round and square cannon-balls and bullets and make a total revolution in the art of war," the round missiles being intended for use against Christians and the square against the Turk. Other promoters invited subscriptions for making salt water fresh, for constructing a wheel of perpetual motion, for importing large jackasses from Spain to improve the breed of English mules, and the boldest of all was the advertisment for "a company for carrying on an undertaking of Great Advantage, but no one to know what it is." This amiable swindler set up shop in Cornhill to receive subscriptions. His office was beseiged by eager investors, and after collecting £2,000 in cash he prudently absconded.

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Age of Revolution (110-111)

This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories (46-47)

Vor caught her gaze, and Raquella seemed surprised to see a healthy stranger standing in the ward. He stepped forward, opening his mouth to speak, when suddenly she recoiled in alarm. One of the patients sprang on Vor from behind and clawed at his breather mask, then fell on him pummeling him and spitting in his face. Fighting instinctively, Vor threw his attacker to one side. The wretch cluchted a scrap of a banner that depicted Serena's baby Manion, and he howled prayers, begging the Three Martyrs to save him, to save them all.

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: The Battle of Corrin (100)

Warnings such as Aquinas's against excess and obsession were also invoked by church fathers not only in regard to the rogue monk tempted to eat more than his share but also in reference to the opposite case - that is, nuns (for they were almost always nuns) who succumbed to the equally disturbing and disruptive temptation to indulge in excessive fasting. These women, whom the historian Rudolph M. Bell has termed "holy anorexics," punished their bodies by starving themselves and indulging in all manner of inventive and frequently disgusting self-mortifications. Though a number of them - Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Claire of Assisi, Saint Veronica - were eventually canonized, in their lifetimes they troubled the ecclesiastical authorities, who cautioned them to be on guard against the sin of pride: the self-satisfaction they might derive from the pain and the heroic discomfort they managed to endure.

Francine Prose, Gluttony (40)

Rekur Van, a biological engineer and geneticist now reviled across the League of Nobles, squirmed in his life-support socket, unable to move more than his head because he had no arms or legs. A retention socket connected the geneticist's body core to nutrient and waste tubes. Shortly after capturing him, Erasmus had seen to the removal of the man's limbs, rendering him much more manageable. He was certainly not trustworthy, in sharp contrast with Gilbertus Albans.

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: The Battle of Corrin (14-15)

Art directors at magazines still, for the most part, prefer freelancers to submit images in the form of transparencies - unless you shoot with a high-end digital camera capable of rendering a high-resolution image no smaller than 10 to 12 megabytes. "Film still has the depth, the color-saturation quality, and sharpness digital does not have," says Tammy Lechner, photo editor for OCR Magazines in Orange County, California. "But with the very high-end cameras, I'd say we're right at the point where there is basically no difference here. The advantages to digital are great. The immediacy of seeing an image during a shoot, the ability to immediately transfer the image through throught upload and download on the computer, and the storage capability of disks for the digital cameras have become greater and greater."

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, "Making Pictures," in The ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing (204)

According to a popular medieval legend, the hermit John of Beverley was tested by God, who sent an angel to force John choose among three sins: drunkenness, rape, or murder. Sensibly, as anyone might, the hermit chose drunkenness. Or not so sensibly, as it would soon turn out, because, in his drunken insensate stupor, he raped and murdered his own sister.

Francine Prose, Gluttony (15)

'Me neither,' Mick said. 'But fame's an interesting thing isn't it? I mean if you'd been raped by Roger Moore, you'd have recognized him, wouldn't you? Or Keanu Reeves or Rowan Atkinson. So he's not that famous. But I was thinking, he was taking quite a risk wasn't he? It wouldn't have done his career much good if it got out that he took part in a gang-bang, would it? You could have gone to the papers or anything.'

Geoff Nicholson, Bleeding London (122)

I found myself on the bridge, between the shores, connected with the past yet connected with some poorly imagined future, in this new place of somebody else's making, futuristically quaint with cars like Bakelite radios, men with jet packs strapped to their shoulders, dressed in skin-tight silver synthetics, helicopters and monorails full of commuters. We thought it might be like this, the London of Dan Dare. We were wrong to expect the expected.

Geoff Nicholson, Bleeding London (28-29)

Joan [of Arc] was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. The records of her trial present us with facts alive to-day through all the mists of time. Out of her own mouth can she be judged in each generation. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang. All soldiers should read her story and ponder on the words and deeds of the true warrior, who in one single year, though untaught in technical arts, reveals in every situation the key to victory.

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain (422)

The ecological crisis cannot be resolved by politics. It cannot be resolved by science or technology. It is a crisis caused by culture and character, and a deep change in personal consciousness is needed. Your fundamental attitudes toward the earth have become twisted. You have made only brutal contact with Nature; you cannot comprehend its grace. You must change. Have few desires and simple pleasures. Honor non-human life. Control yourself, become more authentic. Live lightly upon the earth and treat it with respect. Redefine the word progress and dismiss the managers and masters. Grow inwardly and with knowledge become truly wiser. Think differently, behave differently. For this is essentially a moral issue we face, and moral decisions must be made.

Joy Williams, "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp," in Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (21)

The Despensers and their King now seemed to have attained a height of power. But a tragedy with every feature of classical ruthlessness was to follow. One of the chief Marcher lords, Roger Mortimer, though captured by the King, contrived to escape to France. In 1324 Charles IV of France took advantage of a dispute in Gascony to seize the duchy, except for a coastal strip. Edward's wife, Isabella, "the she-wolf of France," who was disgusted by his passion for Hugh Despenser, suggested that she should go over to France to negotiate with her brother Charles about the restoration of Gascony. There she became the lover and confederate of the exiled Mortimer. She now hit on the stroke of having her son, Prince Edward, sent over from England to do homage for Gascony. As soon as the fourteen-year-old prince, who as heir to the throne could be used to legitimise opposition to King Edward, was in her possession she and Mortimer staged an invasion of England at the head of a large band of exiles. So unpopular and precarious was Edward's Government that Isabella's triumph was swift and complete, and she and Mortimer were emboldened to depose him. The end was a holocaust. In the furious rage which in these days led all who swayed the Government of England to a bloody fate the Despensers were seized and hanged. For the King a more terrible death was reserved. He was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle, and there by hideous methods, which left no mark upon his skin, was slaughtered. His screams as his bowels were burnt out by red-hot irons passed into his body were heard outside the prison walls, and awoke grim echoes which were long unstilled.

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain (319)

By the time dessert is offered, everybody at the table is drunk except for me and the Nazi. Even Greer has had two glasses of Chablis, which for her is drinking to blackout. I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinkinbg into a decade of hard-core drinking and this is why. I blew my wad.

Augusten Burroughs, Dry: A Memoir (223)

Of all the tribes of the Germanic race none was more cruel than the Saxons. Their very tribe name, which spread to the whole confederacy of Northern tribes, was supposed to be derived from the use of a weapon, the seax, a short one-handed sword. Although tradition and the Venerable Bede assign the conquest of Britain to the Angles, Jutes and Saxons together, and although the various settlements have tribal peculiarities, it is probable that before their general exodus from Schleswig-Holstein the Saxons had virtually incorporated the other two strains.

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain (65)

Sober. So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green. It's no longer really summer, but the air is still too warm and heavy to be fall. It's the season between the seasons. It's the feeling of something dying.

Augusten Burroughs, Dry: A Memior (74)

But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful - horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. To make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (136)

As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him at the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn’t spontaneously intervene to prevent him. But in a moment there they were in the conventional pseudo-embrace, actually dancing together, not very skilfully, but without doubt dancing. Dixon looked past her face in silence, afraid of any distraction from the task of not leading her into a collision, for the floor was a good deal more thickly populated than a quarter of an hour earlier. Among the dancers he recognized Barclay, the Professor of Music, dancing with his wife. She permanently resembled a horse, he only when he laughed, which he did suddenly and seldom, but was momentarily to be seen doing now.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (113-114)

Langland was dismissed as an eccentric, but much of the English genius resides in quixotic or quirky individuals who insist upon the truth of their independent vision in the face almost universal derision. Langland rambles; he wanders into theological speculation and effortlessly mixes the comic and the sublime; he will list the various foodstuffs of the poor, and then has a vision of the crucified Christ. He will portray himself as a dazed and helpless narrator but will then introduce the characters of Do-well, Do-bet and Do-best, who migrated into the imagination of John Bunyan. His genius was in fact of such thoroughly English kind that his work was immediately recognised for what it was; it has the deep momentum of the English imagination.

Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (172)

Lord Edward married Emma Lascelles in 1885. She was a remarkably ugly, fat, old woman, with a long upper lip and a protruding lower one. She talked incessantly and sourly about her family and wore a black bonnet in the country and the same bonnet in London with a veil added, and a cape covered in black sequins. She was known in the family as the Slammoth - a mixture between a sloth and a mammoth. They had three sons, Victor, Richard and John. Lord Edward died in 1891 so the eldest son, Victor, eventually became Ninth Duke on the death of his Uncle Cav in 1908.

Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, The House: Living at Chatsworth (34)

The texts of the Anglo-Saxon schools included the Evangelia of Juvencus, the Carmen and Opus Paschale of Sedulius and Arator's De Actibus apostolorum together with other works from the corpus of Christian Latin literature. Virgil's Aeneid was also widely known and quoted, as well as the work of other classical writers such as Lucian and Persius; it is an impressive list for scholars of any period, but it direct evidence for the beginning of "classics" in the English educational system. It is often remarked, with some surprise, that the administrators and politicians of the nineteenth century were accustomed to take quotations from, and make allusions to, the authors of classical antiquity. Yet as early as the seventh century the English bishops and abbots, who were the true administrators of the nation, were equally capable of making reference to Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, Pliny and others. There, again, is a continuity.

Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (37)

One night, at a wedding reception, an extremely drunk man ordered the band to perform “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” then, a half hour later, demanded that it be played again. That night, Arrival struck back with the hydrogen bomb of retaliation songs: “In the Year 2525,” the relentlessly ugly Zager and Evans song with the disturbingly weird lyrics (You won’t find a thing to chew! Nobody’s gonna look at you!). Some guests actually fled the room.

Dave Barry, Tricky Business (50)

Eventually he was posted as a junior to one of the larger Rajput states. To the dismay of the Paramount Power the maharajah had a taste for the sexually bizarre, and a series of rape claims had been brought against him. Privett-Clampe immediately found himself embroiled in the details of the maharajah's private life, in which Argentinian tango dancers, Borzoi dogs, and a ceratin regimental harness-maker in Jaipur all featured. Gus was shocked. The farther he delved, the worse it got. English women. English breeds of dog. He had to keep a French dictionary at his elbow just to decipher the reports. When he found out it was his job, not to give the fellow a sound thrashing but actually to smooth things over, he had a fit of despair and embarked on a mammoth drinking binge.

Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (126-27)

Small wonder that sometimes government could seem to be almost a family business: one-tenth of cabinet members between 1868 and 1955 were themselves sons of ministers. The administration put together by Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil) after the 1900 General Election contained so many members of his own family that it was known as the 'Hotel Cecil'; the career of his Chief Secretary for Ireland is much less memorable than the quip about how he got the job: 'Bob's your uncle.' Lord Grey's Whig administration of 1830-34, which drive the Great Reform Act through parliament, included seven members of his own family. His great-great-nephew was Sir Edward Grey, later Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of the First World War. It was he, looking out of the Foreign Secretary's office at dusk in St James's Park, who remarked in August 1914 that 'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life.' Reading his biography, one is baffled as to why he was in public life at all: he clearly would have been much happier fly-fishing or birdwatching. An explanation is given by the Associated Press obituary on his death in 1933. 'Public life drew him, not because he had a tatse for it, but because he was one of the Greys of Northumberland, a member of the great governing class of Britain.'

Jeremy Paxman, The Political Animal (26-27)

The young woman looked up at Yaisuah, who took this moment to twist in delirium. She looked back at the spearman. Her back was to her companions and she faced only Hali as she lifted the spearman's hand and placed it on her breast inside her robe. At that instant, Yaisuah arched his back against the wooden upright and called out: "Father! Father, why have you forsaken me?"

Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom, The Jesus Incident (172)