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1 " It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." " You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" " No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, " nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." " Odd," said Arthur, " I thought you said it was a democracy." " I did," said Ford. " It is." " So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, " why don't people get rid of the lizards?" " It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. " They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." " You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" " Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, " of course." " But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, " why?" " Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, " the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?" " What?" " I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, " have you got any gin?" " I'll look. Tell me about the lizards." Ford shrugged again." Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. " They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it." " But that's terrible," said Arthur." Listen, bud," said Ford, " if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin. "
2 " Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud,but I walked numbly through the park, round and round, 40 times for 4 hoursjust wanting to make it through the day.There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got throughand the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories,but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desktick tick tickme not making a soundand some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind,but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine.This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely waysbut you can not let it.I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use. the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness,thinking it will help but it only feeds the fireand I don't want to hurt myself anymore.I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all. And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again. It will always be spring again.And there will always be a new day. "
― Charlotte Eriksson
3 " Oh- and grab the plastic bag over by my suitcase." I slug down the last of the coffee and get up. The bag contains panty hose. I put them on her desk." They're for you." " You want me to look homeless, desperate, but also kind of fabulous? "
4 " I snatched up the cardboard cup, plastered my lips to the plastic sippy-lid and sucked down a scalding hot mouthful. It burned, but I didn’t give a damn. I held the cup to my chest as if it were my most special friend while feeling the instant affect the coffee had on my mood and I smiled. “Hello lover. "
― Ethan Day , Life in Fusion (Summit City, #2)
5 " The kiss is different than I expected. It’s slow and tender, his lips soft and warm against mine. He tastes sweet, like the powdered sugar I spilt and the coffee with chicory he’s always drinking. It’s a perfect first kiss. "
― D.L. Hess , Sir (The Awakening Series Book 1)
6 " You cant Realize Someone Good Is Coming Your Way, if still Remain Sleep on the Fact that they Actually Exist! Wake and smell the Coffee or Excuse yourself if your Nose is a bit Stuffy. "
7 " Some relations just begin. Sometimes you need to but don’t want to make the first move. And you want to wait. I want to wait. Yes I want to. Why do some people suddenly come into your life out of nowhere and make a place in your heart? Its almost sacred or divine. And how do they? You want them to look at you and when they do, you don’t have the strength to look back. Why? You just feel too weak to look back. So is this love? But I want that strength inside me. And I know the person wants me too. But I am ready to wait. No hurry at all. Life is a paradox I know. And that’s very inviting.”A Novella, The Coffee and The Cola, Published 2016. "
8 " Swinging the door open, I took a sip. All of the coffee in the world wouldn't help if more visitors showed up at my door this early in the morning but the caffeine fortification was a bonus. The delivery guy pushed his clipboard at me. I held up my cup and raided my eyebrows.We had an entire conversation in the next seven seconds with our eyes and eyebrows.I told him that I wasn't giving up my coffee for his delivery. He told me that if I'd just sign on the damned dotted line he would get the hell out of here.I replied in turn that if he'd hold the clipboard instead of shoving it at me (I threw in a nod here for good measure), I'd sign the damned line.He finally sighed, turned the clipboard around and held the pen out.I braced the door with my hip, grabbed the pen and scrawled Wilma Flinstone on the paper. "
9 " I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun?I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without.I want to be someone you can’t live without. "
10 " Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy…You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess: you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you’ve had to do with this is as far you’ve got And something tellys you, you’re not going much farther if any.And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering……Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn’t see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn’t so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren’t a kid any more.So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself.And hoping. "
― Jim Thompson , A Hell of a Woman
11 " The morning was brisk and the coffee was hot and roasted with little gurgles in the room. Rosie hadn’t moved, but she let out a tiny snore every now and again that made everything perfect. "
― Ruth McLeod-Kearns , Blood Mother
12 " An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - " Why are you sad?" " I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous." You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. " It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. " It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. " But none is worse. "
13 " Appreciate What You Have" Just sitting, looking, thinking,Staring at the coffee which I was drinking,Oh, what a lucky person I must be,That God gave me sight to see.Then reading the news, I saw some more,That I still have hands to be able to draw.Sometimes we do not realise how lucky we are that we always strive for more ! I wrote this many years ago and if only people were satisfied with what they had, not get jeolous & envious, the world would be a better place: "
14 " At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. I suppose what they really did was physiological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry. "
― Jo Walton , Among Others
15 " Where was this written? I wondered. Where in the Talmud or the Koran or the Bible did it say, " Lo, and Satan fetcheth the coffee for the Antichrist and her minions" ? "
16 " Three weeks hadn't changed Cop Central. The coffee was still poisonous, the noise abominable, and the view out of her stingy window was still miserable.She was thrilled to be back. "
― J.D. Robb , Rapture in Death (In Death, #4)
17 " He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a " deeper," " spiritual" world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea - the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction... and that to cease to do so would be " priggish," " intolerant," and... " Puritanical. "
18 " Put the coffee on, bubbles, I'm coming home "
― Richard Brautigan , Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork
19 " Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep. "
― Ernest Hemingway , The Nick Adams Stories
20 " Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one. "
― Daniel José Older , Shadowshaper (Shadowshaper Cypher #1)