Quotes from Tim Dorsey

Oh, I'm with the government all right," said Serge. "But when I say 'with,' I mean in the context of I'm in favor of it because otherwise there are no streets or postage stamps, and everyone wanders the woods carrying their own mail and looking at the sun to know when to eat until there's an eclipse and everyone's blind. That's why you should vote.

The Roman Empire invented snacks, right after the aqueducts. Irrigation flowed, food plentiful, people munching between meals in the city-states. They ate these little, sun-dried meaty things, highly distasteful and falling out of favor until olive oil. I just made all that up. The key to life is making shit up. Everyone does it or society would unravel, like, Gee, your hair looks great! Or: God told me you're wrong

Things sure have changed. FDR tried to calm us: "Nothing to fear but fear itself." Now politicians encourage the jitters. Panic is the new patriotism. "Today's Threat Level: Duck!

That's life in general: Can't let jerks dictate your emotions.

These rare gray afternoons evoke a sweet, childhood melancholy in my soul, like when it rained in kindergarten and we had to stay inside and do crafts with library paste and pipe cleaners and buttons, and I made the best project in the whole class, an ultra-powerful rubber-band zip gun, but the teacher gave me a zero because I got her in the eye with a button.

Make no mistake: I'm all about guns! I just love the legal incongruities our national discourse has spawned, like I can buy a shotgun any time of day without a serious background check, but if I need something for my sniffles, it's six forms of ID and complete school transcripts. The government has essentially created a system where if I want to clear a head cold, the easiest cure is to blow my brains out.

worry is usually interest paid on a debt that never comes due.

The brain wasn't engineered to deal with that rarefied level of dumbness.

Like no other place on earth. Raw natural beauty, relentless freedom, unorthodox natives. A friend told me something else about the Keys I never forgot: Down here, nobody is who they seem to be. When people in other parts of the country want to reinvent themselves, they come to Florida. But when people in Florida want to reinvent themselves, they come to the Keys.

The way I figured, I was just a kid, and if I could take it apart, they surely could put it back together. Then my mom would walk in the kitchen and see me standing on a chair at the counter, holding a screwdriver with disassembled components all over the place. 'What the heck's going on?' 'I'm intrigued how the blender works.

Chasing is in police DNA memory, like Labradors running after sticks," said Serge. "They probably don't even know why they do it. They just put the lights on and go, and a while later the partner who isn't behind the wheel says, 'Why are we stopping?' 'Something inside just told me to because there's a really cool crash up ahead. It's weird; I can't explain it.

Life's too important to learn new clocks, so I unplug them all and get on with the plot.

Those] on fixed incomes are the nation's math elite.

Gasparilla is Tampa's annual heritage festival, and Tampa's heritage appears to be about alcohol.

What's this whole Parrot Head phenomenon about, anyway?" asked Crease. "It's kind of like AA in reverse.

fusing themselves into a single new genre about partying all night with gangsta bitches screwing cowboys to the nasty beat that leads to Jesus.

Back at the Rash [a Florida nightclub], a waif in a lime latex body tube went into the rest room to snort the newest designer drug, XGB5, which gave people the uncanny sensation of throwing money away while chewing their own lips off. It was hard to come by and everyone had to have it.

The last door on the second story was the exception. Fresh gold letters: MAHONEY & ASSOCIATES, PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS. Mahoney sat inside. The only associate was the fifth of rye residing in his bottom desk drawer.

whenever something goes to hell everywhere else in the country, Florida puts it on roller skates with rocket thrusters.

Maybe it was their names, they thought. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm.

Turnoffs: the word conflate and women who think a small dog in a purse is a fashion accessory.

I also sort of broke his neck, just to be careful," said Serge.

Why read a book? If you read books you'd understand that question is like 'Why Breathe?

When those buses arrive, the last thing I need is some geriatric rumble." The