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Spoonbenders QUOTES

Spoonbenders QUOTES

1 " The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

2 " Fucking is not an adequate name for what we just did there,' Irene said. 'We need a better word. Something more festive.'

'Fucktivities?' he offered.

'Celebratio,' she said.

'Funnilingus! "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

3 " Duty eats free will for breakfast. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

4 " The business travelers, however, were all business, from their business jacket to their business skirts and their skinny business shoes. They sliced through the crowd of civilians like business sharks "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

5 " I haven’t used my dick in so long I wouldn’t know where to find it. I sent it out for a pack of Camels in 1979 and it never came back. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

6 " He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully.

"You want one?"

"No thanks. Had a touch of the cancer a few years ago."

"What kind?"

"Prostate."

"I'm not asking you to smoke it in your ass. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

7 " They piled into Irene's Festiva, a car that won the award for most ironic distance between name and driving experience. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

8 " You know why I’m raising you kids to be Cubs fans?” Buddy shakes his head. “Any mook can be a fan of a winning team,” Dad says. “It takes character to root for the doomed. You show up, you watch your boys take their swings, and you watch ’em go down in flames—every damn day. You think Jack Brickhouse is an optimist? No-siree. He may sound happy, but he’s dying inside. There’s no seat in Wrigley Field for a God damn Pollyanna. You root-root-root for the home team, and they lose anyway. It teaches you how the world works, kid. Sure, start every spring with your hopes and dreams, but in the universe in which we live, you will be mathematically eliminated by Labor Day. Count on it. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

9 " Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names—River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview—and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

10 " Smocks were the official uniform of those hanging on to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder; a parachute that would never open. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

11 " It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint into his face, and the shade was named Blinding Pain. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

12 " It was like wandering her house, except that everything was bright and blinking and pixelated. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

13 " Mayor Bilandic had lost the ’79 election not because he failed to clean up the snow after those storms, but because he looked like a wimp apologizing for it, while Jane Byrne was clearly the toughest, most unapologetic woman in Chicago. (“You know how sometimes it gets too cold to snow? That was Jane Byrne’s face.”) "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

14 " Poor bastard. Literally. His mom was broke, and his dad had abandoned the family years ago. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

15 " Graciella’s frown was there and gone in an instant. He didn’t know how to interpret that. If they were playing poker, it would have telegraphed that she’d picked a bad card, and he would have bet against her. But in the game of Real Women, he was forever a novice. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

16 " Eight-year-olds playing soccer, Teddy decided, was a lot like a pack of border collies chasing a single sheep, except that the dogs would’ve used more teamwork. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

17 " Her dogmatic belief that she was doomed infuriated him. It was surrender. Negative thinking. He knew that if they talked about death, if they planned for it, they would only give it power over them. Why invite the specter into their house, pour it a cup of coffee, let it put its bony feet all over their couch? "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

18 " New love walks up and slaps you on the butt, demands your attention, gets your pulse racing. Old love lies in wait. It’s there in the evening when your eyes are closing. It slides into bed beside you, runs its ghost fingers through your hair, whispers your secret name. Old love is never gone. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

19 " Embrace mediocrity,” Teddy said. “That’s my advice to you, my friend. Lower the bar. Accept the C-minus. Give up on the rib eye and order the hamburger. "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders

20 " The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? "

― Daryl Gregory , Spoonbenders