Quotes from Charlotte MacLeod

The trip itself was the usual...adulation from all sides, rose petals strewn in my path everywhere I went, silver bells festooning the howdah on my private white elephant...you know the drill. I maintained my customary demeanor or regal calm and enigmatic silence throughout.

Don't you have something plain and wholesome, like scotch or bourbon?

Nor did she merely smile, she glowed with inner goodness that made him think of the vast iron cookstove in his grandmother's kitchen back on the farm. Here, he knew by certain instinct, was a woman who made wonderful cookies and would give you some.

I thought you were a folk singer.' 'No, I just need a haircut. In point of fact, I can't tell one note from another.' 'That needn't prevent you from being a folk singer.

Not that he'd have doubted Helen's word in any case; she was a librarian, and librarians were never wrong.

Man cannot live by swine alone.

he—I do wish somebody would think up a new collective pronoun—

Go then, I will keep a herring in the window for you.

Shandy. Have you begun your Ptolemaic

Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors....

He's about to fall asleep in his plate.

it is we who degrade ourselves by allowing our standards to be debased without a struggle.

Him? Make the trip twice? I might have believed it if I'd seen it, but I didn't, so I won't.

There was no sound from the cats. Unlike dogs and rattlesnakes, they don't warn you before they strike. They aren't gentlemen. That's one of the reasons why I like them.

Peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near. Isaiah 57:19.

Ungley had afforded Balaclava little enough diversion during his lifetime. Maybe he was atoning by departing in a fashion so much more dramatic than his lectures could ever have been.

In the exquisite boudoir below, his mother was no doubt embroidering French knots on the draperies. That did seem an odd way to relieve frustration, but perhaps Aunt Caroline enjoyed the nubbly texture that the heavy draperies had taken on as a result of her labors over the years. Anyway, she kept on working French knots and would do so, no doubt, until the curtains fell apart.

I know liquor's a good servant but a bad master.

She sipped her sirupy stimulant with sibylline susurrations.

We do have to be on guard these days or we're likely to get swatted by a belligerent pronoun or hit with a preposition we didn't see coming. These are perilous times for the English language, in case you hadn't noticed.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Why do women have this perverse talent for sneaking up on a man and whamming him over the head with some inconsequential chore when he has his mind on weightier issues? Because men have this perverse talent for weaseling out of the chores on the specious grounds that doing a little honest work around the place is less important than playing Cops & Robbers with Fred Ottermole.