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-   -   Funny lines from books you’ve read (https://www.talkofthevillages.com/forums/talk-books-126/funny-lines-books-youve-read-291895/)

Bjeanj 05-20-2019 12:33 PM

Funny lines from books you’ve read
 
Just reading what I call a “beach book” called Whiskey for Breakfast, by Liliana Hart.
“The woman was somewhere between twenty-two and seventy-two. There was too much plastic surgery getting in the way to make an accurate guess, and I was thinking we’d probably have to chop her in half and count her rings if we wanted to know her real age.”

Have you read something that tickled you?

JGVillages 05-21-2019 04:39 PM

Can’t remember the name of the book or publication, but when Gary Player (hall of fame professional golfer) was asked “ When did you know it was time to retire from the Senior Tour”, his reply was “I knew it was time to retire when I could hear my drives land”.

fw102807 05-21-2019 04:48 PM

I love Alice in Wonderland as it has so many interesting quotes.
“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

chachacha 05-21-2019 07:13 PM

My favorite line, although I don't remember the source, was "I don't want YOUR best, I want THE best!" to an employee. Was there a book called The Assistant? It may be from that! Yes, Bernard Malamud, I read it in college!

fishon 05-21-2019 10:58 PM

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States ‘Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael ‘BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN”

Excerpt From: Melville, Herman. “Moby Dick.” Oxford Text

Bjeanj 05-22-2019 09:46 AM

These are great! Will have to find the book The Assistant.

CFrance 05-22-2019 11:17 AM

I don't know if it's from a book or a column. Dave Barry:

Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.

also...

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Bjeanj 05-22-2019 11:20 AM

Really funny. And accurate.

mixsonci 05-22-2019 11:57 AM

IN the movie (I assume it's also a book), Philadelphia, there is a line that Denzel Washington says to Tom Hanks character after he decides to take his case about the early AIDS epidemic, he says "OK, now explain it to me in detail as if I were a six year old", I never forgot that line because it's so true if you want people to really understand something, explain it simply and in detail.

CFrance 05-22-2019 12:05 PM

More Dave Barry: Everyone has a right to be stupid. Some just abuse the privilege.

Also, concerning dogs: You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!

A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.

Taltarzac725 05-22-2019 01:36 PM

Catch 22 quotes from Joseph Heller's book.
 
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

CFrance 05-22-2019 01:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Taltarzac725 (Post 1651738)
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Fantastic, Tal. Thanks. Brought it back to me.

retiredguy123 05-22-2019 03:19 PM

Lewis Grizzard was a comedian from Georgia who wrote many books. In one book, shortly after his fourth expensive divorce, someone asked him if he planned to get married again. He replied, "No, I think I'll just find a woman who I don't like, and buy her a house".

Bjeanj 05-22-2019 06:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by retiredguy123 (Post 1651763)
Lewis Grizzard was a comedian from Georgia who wrote many books. In one book, shortly after his fourth expensive divorce, someone asked him if he planned to get married again. He replied, "No, I think I'll just find a woman who I don't like, and buy her a house".

:clap2::clap2::clap2:

fishon 05-23-2019 04:51 PM

It was Oct. 18, 1851, when Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was first published. Though it was not an immediate hit, and Melville didn’t live to see the fame his book would achieve, it would eventually become one of American literature’s most famous and beloved works of genius. The critic Lewis Mumford would call it “one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language,” and it would inspire adaptations from cinema to emoji literature. Today, because the work is in the public domain, it is easier to read the original than ever before; it can be found online in countless places. Here, get started with the first chapter.—TIME Staff

CHAPTER 1. Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time tozz get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.


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Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,— north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.


But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?— Water— there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.


Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick— grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.


No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way— either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.


Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,— what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way— he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.”

“Whaling voyage by one Ishmael.”

“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”—


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