Microblog Memes

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini

I remember finding a Shadow Warrior novel (based on the video game) and I only remember how it opened because it was batshit insane. Lo Wang is at a restaurant trying to decide what to get weighing the pros and cons of getting some fish thing that he knows would give him major gas and he didn't want to upset some woman he was going to be with latwr by stinking up the joint, when a bunch of the big bad's ninjas show up and try to kill him. He easily kills them all, and at one point cuts one of their noses off and flicks it into the bowl of soup another patron looking on in horror had ordered, while Wang thinks to himself that guy is gonna take the nose home to show his children and tell the story about how Lo Wang stopped a bunch of evil ninjas.

I read this in high school and even as a teen who loved that shit, I thought it was cringe af. Like a wild fanfic you'd find on a blog or forum. Yet I paid money for it in a book.

A, abbrev., amperes

words to live by

The first line of Shirley Jackson's Haunting Of Hill House is a banger, the complete first paragraph is incredible.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone

I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

A Prayer For Owen Meany
-- John Irving

"Call me Ishmael" has always been my favorite

"A screaming comes across the sky." -Gravity's Rainbow

Ive long found something amusing about Seveneves's opening line being "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason".

"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."

• Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.

Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.

The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.

— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North

Damn, this post honestly reminded me why I love reading. Thanks for that.

An evocative one which has stayed with me: “I had barely regained the ability to walk. I could not chase women, but could slowly make my way up the stairs to the whorehouse.”

I can’t remember where it’s from. Perhaps Bukowski or one of his contemporaries?

“So… You’ll cut my head off.” I raised an eyebrow at the salescritter. I was baiting him. I knew it, he knew it, I knew he knew it.

We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

Honestly it doesn't do the series justice, but it's still a standout.

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

“Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity - good.”

Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

(The context turns out to be the protagonist listening to his dad start the truck and drive away.)

Call me Ishmael.

One of the all time greats.

One that always stayed with me is from a coming-of-age story:

If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its color, I know just what I would call it—dinosaur skin.

• Sarah Weeks - So B. It

If you're curious, here's the rest of the first chapter which really ties the first sentence together nicely:

I used to think, without really thinking about it, that I knew what color that was. But that was a long time ago, before I knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth.

The fact is, you can’t tell squat about the color of an animal just from looking at its bones, so nobody knows for sure what color dinosaurs really were. For years I looked at pictures of them, trusting that whoever was in charge of coloring them in was doing it based on scientific fact, but the truth is they were only guessing. I realized that one afternoon, sitting in the front seat of Sheriff Roy Franklin’s squad car, the fall before I turned thirteen.

Another thing I found out right around that same time is that not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re stupid. All it means is that there’s still room left to wonder. For instance about dinosaurs—were they the same color as the sky the morning I set off for Liberty? Or were they maybe the same shade of brown as the dust my shoes kicked up on the driveway at Hilltop Home?

I’d be lying if I said that given a choice, I wouldn’t rather know than not know. But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t.

The truth is, whether you know something or not doesn’t change what was. If dinosaurs were blue, they were blue; if they were brown, they were brown whether anybody ever knows it for a fact or not.

“In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

-Bradbury, Kaleidoscope

Late to the party, but:

A vessel may be defined as an object that keeps the water either in or out; it is the latter sort that concerns us.

The Elements of Seamanship by Roger C Taylor

I saw my first goblin the same day I saw my first shipwreck.

I was under sail, on my way to war. On my way to fall in love with death, and with a queen.

On my way to lose all of my friends, and two of my brothers.

I would see a great city fall in blood and fire, betrayed by a false god.

Later, I would be commanded to die on a high stone bridge, but I would fail in this.

The rest of the First Lanza of His Majesty’s Corvid Knights would not fail.

This is not a happy story, but it is a true one.

I have no time for lies, or for liars.

• The Daughters War

And yes, Corvid Knights are as badass as you think. Maybe more.

The first line of James Ellroy's LA Confidential is what immediately moved me from solely reading fantasy and sci-fi as a young man and opened the door a world of hard-boiled crime that would go on to include the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

There's something about Ellroy's clipped, staccatto writing rhythm (he calls it "shotgun prose") that grabbed me from the very first moment.

An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninetyfour thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border--right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.

This is the story of a bloodstained boy. There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. - Railsea, China Mieville.

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.