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1 " Look, Laszlo. I'll have the dentist with me, and I don't want to alarm her any more than necessary. So take Vanna out of the backseat and stick her in the trunk." Shanna halted. Her mouth dropped open. Her throat seized up, making it hard to breathe.I don't care how much crap you have in the trunk. We're not driving around with a naked body in the car." Oh no! She gasped for air. He was a hit man. "
2 " Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen. "
― Joe Meno , The Great Perhaps
3 " We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don'tgrow on trees, like in the old days. So wheredoes one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit cardin a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.The sloppy kiss. The peck.The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The weshouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lipstaste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.The I accept your apology, but you make me really madsometimes kiss. The I knowyour tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you getolder, kisses become scarce. You'll be drivinghome and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If youwere younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth'sred door just to see how it fits. Oh wheredoes one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss overand answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspiciousand stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out ofyour body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it lefton the inside of your mouth. You mustnurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how itilluminates the room. Hold it to your chestand wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from aspecial beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneatha Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.But one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones. "
― Jeffrey McDaniel
4 " I cruised into this war thinking my buddy's going to take a bullet, and I'm going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm's way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad's car. "
― Evan Wright , Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
5 " . . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.But it did. "
― Stephen Graham Jones , Ledfeather
6 " When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes.That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills. "
― Alice Schroeder , The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
7 " Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. “Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?” Hurt asked at one point. “I can tell you,” Karpis said. “How do you know where it is?” asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover. “We were thinking of robbing it,” Karpis said. "
― Bryan Burrough , Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
8 " I gave her a look. “Rachel.”“Grace, you have to admit this is pretty weird. Say it. You disappearing from the hospital and Olivia is — and Sam suddenly shows up with you and, well, the freaky hallucinogenic mushrooms are looking more and more realistic, especially when you start talking about wolves. Because next step is for Isabel Culpeper to show up saying that everybody’s going to be abducted by aliens and I have to tell you,I can’t take that in my fragile emotional state. I think that —”I sighed. “Rachel.”“Fine,” she said. She threw her bag in the backseat and climbed in after. "
― Maggie Stiefvater , Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1)
9 " I want to feel you up like we're sixteen in the backseat of a car. On the outside of your clothes," he said just above a whisper. " Touch you all over, then slide my hands up under your shirt. "
10 " Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child? "
11 " Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello with a sudden upward jutting of my chin, sitting in the backseat of someone else’s car, bumping up and down the San Francisco hills, south of Market, seeing people attacking their instruments, afterward stopping at a bodega, parking, carrying the bottles in a paper bag, the glass clinking, all our faces bright, glowing under streetlamps, down the sidewalk to this or that apartment party, hi, hi, putting the bottles in the fridge, removing one for now, hating the apartment, checking the view, sitting on the arm of a couch and being told not to, and then waiting for the bathroom, staring idly at that ubiquitous Ansel Adams print, Yosemite, talking to a short-haired girl while waiting in the hallway, talking about teeth, no reason really, the train of thought unclear, asking to see her fillings, no, really, I’ll show you mine first, ha ha, then no, you go ahead, I’ll go after you, then, after using the bathroom she is still there, still in the hallway, she was waiting not just for the bathroom but for me, and so eventually we’ll go home together, her apartment, where she lives alone, in a wide, immaculate railroad type place, newly painted, decorated with her mother, then sleeping in her oversized, oversoft white bed, eating breakfast in her light-filled nook, then maybe to the beach for a few hours with the Sunday paper, then wandering home whenever, never-Fuck. We don't even have a baby-sitter. "
― , A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
12 " As Ian popped the lock and opened the car door, he turned to Phoebe. “Can you do me a favour?”She immediately stepped toward him, fully embracing their new mature relationship. “Of course.”Ian looked pointedly over his own shoulder and said, “Tell me the truth. Does this car make my glowing ass look fat?”She’d naturally followed the direction of his gaze, but now she looked up, hard, into his eyes. And she smiled back at him despite herself. She even laughed. “You’re an idiot.”“When things get too serious, I get a rash.”She pointedly looked back down at his nether regions, despite the fact doing so made her blush. Still, she spoke coolly, dryly. “Not on your ass.”If Ian believed in love, that would’ve been it for him. Instantly. Enthrallingly. Eternally. Instead, he just laughed. “Thank God for that. See if there’s anything remotely clothinglike in the backseat or the trunk. "
― Suzanne Brockmann , Do or Die (Reluctant Heroes #1)
13 " What do you think he saw?" Damn--I regret the awed way I phrased that and the hushed voice I used. As if I think acid is a " religious" experience, a visionary thing." Himself," Josh says. " You always see your true self on acid. You just usually see more than you want to see. So it all seems disorted." See what I mean? He's not your normal stoner. The guy should become a poet, a psychologist, a scientist. We pull up near Greg's house and stare at it like it's a damn fortress. " You don't think he needs to go to the hospital?" I ask. " Nope," Josh says. " For a while, I thought maybe, yeah. But he's good now, he's off it, he's not hallucinating anymore." " You're sure?" " Yeah." " 'Cuz you can die on LSD-" " That's such anti-drug propaganda bullshit, Dan," Josh interrupts. " Nobody's ever died from an LSD overdose. Ever. As long as you keep people from doing stupid things while they're tripping, it's all good man, man. Why do you think I babysat him?" He reaches into the backseat and punches my shoulder. " LSD isn't your dad's smack. So stop worrying." I scrunch down in the seat. How'd he know about that? " Right. What's the plan?" " I'd ask him if ther was a key hidden under a rock," Josh says, " but he's not gonna be much help. Watch." He pokes Greg in the leg, prods him on the shoulder, grabs his cheeks and smushes them together, the way parents do to a baby, and says, " Ootchi googi Greggy, did ums have a good trippy? Did ums find out itty-bitty singies about oos-self zat oos didn't likeums?" Yup... Greg was in his own little world... "
14 " I pulled my suitcase out of the backseat of my bug, along with Cannoli's new travel case, a spiffy animal print pet backpack on wheels. When I first saw it, I thought maybe the dog was supposed to wear the backpack, but it turned out the person wore the backpack with the dog in it. "
― Claire Cook , Summer Blowout
15 " Elias revved the engine menacingly. I put my hand on the steering wheel. " That's my mom! Don't even think about it." " How about I just back over the ones behind us?" " Or the ones on the sidewalk," one of the guys in the backseat suggested. " Be serious," I said, though they might have been. "
16 " There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello. "
― Richard Siken , Crush
17 " In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine. "
― Anna Godbersen , Bright Young Things (Bright Young Things, #1)