Quotes from Gene Doucette

WELCOME, EVERYONE!" he said. "IT'S THE YEAR 2129, AND BOY DO I HAVE A STORY FOR YOU!

THE ONLY MADNESS GREATER THAN CHALLENGING FATE IS ACCEPTING IT.

I used to face charging lions in the Serengeti with nothing more than a stone axe and a loincloth. People today disappoint me.

To ward off these disasters, they spent a whole lot of time trying to keep their gods happy via a number of complex rituals, many involving copious amounts of sex ("the gods wish us to have sex" is the oldest pickup line in the world) and human sacrifice. And whoever happened to be their king was also a god, which simplified the political process quite a lot.

Amazingly, deconstructionists and cultural relativists were almost never stoned, which meant the crap they were spouting came to them when they were in a non-altered state, so they were invariably fairly stupid, or at least not nearly as smart as they thought they were.

Pixies, the first communists.

Silly. Moon for you?" "No, the moon is for everyone," I said. "Tree is for everyone." Pixies, the first communists.

if you want to know what I've learned in my extended time on Earth it is this: beer is good.

I'd sooner cut off my hand and shove flowers in the stump than use this miserable excuse for pottery, but my friend is deranged enough to think otherwise.

Kings associate themselves with one god or another, sometimes Re, but generally Osiris or his father Horus.

History was by definition one long chaotic, violent mess sometimes interrupted by magnificent eras of peace that remind everybody life occasionally wasn't awful.

I'm actually something of an aficionado in the waking up in strange places department. I've woken up in hay lofts, under a buttern churn, on roofs, in a choir loft (twice), under tables, on tables, in trees, in ditches, and half-pinned under a sleeping ox. One time in Bombay, I woke up to find myself lashed to a yak.

I don't understand American football. If you're going to line a bunch of behemoths up in front of a bunch of other behemoths and ask them to hit each other as hard as they can, why tell them they can only hit one another a certain way? Too many rules, that's the problem.

Very few vampires bother to sleep in a coffin, if you must know. Lugging one around everywhere you go is inconvenient, and it almost always attracts the wrong kind of attention. I did know a vampire who had one, but it was mostly a kinky sex thing for her.)

So, you'd rather just regurgitate what these books tell you than know what really happened? Exactly. No quest for truth? Where's your spirit of exploration? You never went to college, did you?

A note: succubi are notorious amateur psychologists and have been since well before Freud. In fact I have it on good authority that Freud stole his whole gig from a particularly talkative succubus he used to know. And if you don't believe Freud knew a succubus, you haven't read Freud.)

A point about vampires. They can and do have sex. I've tried it. It's not bad. A little cold, a little dry... it's kind of like screwing a very lively statue.

I own an island. Because when you have a chance to own an island, you just do.)

The dragon roared. Terrible sound, that. Made my testicles shrink.

Most jobs I've had have been variations on hunter-gatherer and farmer. I was one of the first to say Hey, if we grow our own food, we won't have to hunt it down all the time. Mostly, I was just tired of moving around constantly, but you have to admit it was a pretty good idea.)

Between you and me, Plato was a hack. All that crap about higher forms and caves? He was drunk when he wrote it. I know. I was there.

If there's one thing I know, it's that the minute someone feels obligated to tell you not to be afraid of them, that's the time to start being afraid of them.

We just met and we're already doing heroin? I said. Seems sudden.

I may have seemed like things quieted down a bit once we all figured out how to farm, because farming begets society and society develops laws, and laws enforce peace in the interest of the greater good. But society is just another kind of tribe and it eventually bumps into a larger one, and there's more violence, only then it's called war.