Highlights from July: Lines Worth Repeating

Here’s a collection of my favorite phrases/sentences/paragraphs from last month that I haven’t already used for something. (I will skip most audiobooks, my transcription skills aren’t what they should be. But when I try, the punctuation, etc. is just a guess).

Songbird by Peter Grainger

“How old is Michelle?” It doesn’t matter how you ask the question, whichever tense you go with sounds wrong. Reeve had concluded that to say “was” now, would be too soon, that’s all

The [remark about] fast cars were true without a doubt. He’d been in one or two of those with Catherine, and surviving the experience was enough to make you reconsider your rejection of the Christian faith.

There had been times, and not a few of them, when Waters had thought, “Why doesn’t he let that go? Why go out on a limb for something trivial? For some small point of principle?” But there’s no such thing as a small point of principle, principles are big things. If principles aren’t worth fighting for, what else is? What else matters?

A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age by Emmy J. Favilla

Warning: Here’s where I might start to get a little emotional. Because what’s more beautiful than a strategically placed em dash? Answer: interspecies friendships, random acts of kindness, Oscar Isaac, an empty subway car during rush hour that isn’t the result of a putrid mystery substance permeating the air. But the em dash is not too far behind!

Face it: You hate whom. If you don’t, you’re likely a liar or someone with an English degree who actually still really hates whom but can’t bear to come to terms with your traitorous hatred for fear of your overpriced degree being snatched from your cold, dead hands, never to be seen again. In casual conversation we end sentences with prepositions and we never use whom. It’s a fact. And if you do use whom in conversational speech, you will never see yourself on an invite to a dinner party at my place. Mostly because I’m not the type of person who has dinner parties or uses whom.

The Botanist by M.W. Craven

‘I didn’t want you thinking I’d panicked. I didn’t want you thinking less of me.’

Poe was lost for words. ‘Why would I think less of you?’ he said eventually. ‘You’d just found your father’s corpse. There was a bullet hole in his head. If you can’t panic then, when can you?’

The Law by Jim Butcher

I’d been feeling sorry for myself, which is about the most useless thing you can feel: it doesn’t do a damned thing for you. You don’t feel any better, you don’t get any better, and you’re too busy moping to do anything to actually make your life any better.

The Self-Made Widow by Fabian Nicieza

He wore a faded Creed T-shirt from their 1999 Human Clay tour, which Michelle assumed he would never have worn had he known he’d be dying in it.

Brianne was smart, but she was intellectually lazy, mostly as a result of all the years spent being intellectually lazy.

She started to walk away when he said, “Andrea, since we’re still getting to know each other, for the record, I’ve watched IEDs blow up my friends and I’ve been shot five times, with my vest stopping only three of those.”

He let that sink in for a second.

“You have to come at me with something much better than veiled threats to my job.”

“Filed for future reference, Chief,” she said. “Threats to your wife and kids it is, then. . . .”

Derek and Molly didn’t have a fantasy marriage with wind chimes resonating as they pranced about a grassy field like a pharmaceutical commercial distracting you while the rapid-fire voiceover warned you about side effects like rectal bleeding.

Andrea and Jeff had gone to the preserve only once. He didn’t like nature unless it came with a nineteenth hole, and she didn’t like it without concrete sidewalks and blaring taxi horns.

[redacted]’s eyes looked panicked while the other looked homicidal. It gave him a Bill the Cat quality from the old Bloom County strip.

How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior

So this is what dying is like. Who’d have thought it’d be so frustrating and boring? I’d like it to be over, but no doubt it will drag itself out as long as possible, just like life. How extremely tedious.

With Grimm Resolve by Jeffrey H. Haskell

“Good job, sir,” she said. She knew how fragile officers’ egos were, and it was helpful to reassure them they could find their butt with both hands and a map.

“I don’t really know how to explain it sir.”

“Take your time,” Jacob said with a grin. “It’s only a hitherto unknown stellar phenomenon. You can have a few seconds to figure out how to describe it.”

Jacob took his seat, glancing at the readiness board on his MFD. The ship was at a hundred percent and they were either going to enter the starlane in less than half an hour, or they would die.

Personally, he hoped for the former.

Whispers in the Dark by Chris McDonald

I’d even been interviewed about the case by a petty criminal, from the back seat of the police car on our way back to the station. He told me his mates won’t believe him that he was arrested by THE Erika Piper, and asked could he have a picture to prove it. I’d impolitely declined.

He has me where he wants me. He knows that I am hanging on his every word and he is revelling in it. Though, I swear if he says ‘you see’ again, I will not be responsible for my actions. Liam can sense my mood and intervenes.

As the lift doors close, I can’t help but think I’d been quick to condemn the reception area. Compared to the interior of the lift, it could be confused for a fancy Mayfair hotel. The buttons on the console are coated in a sticky film and Liam does the chivalrous thing, stretching his coat over his hand and prodding the button with supersonic speed.

Ghost of a Chance by Dan Willis

“Is that serious?”

“Very,” Kellin said.

“Untreated it can cause brain injury and even death.”

“What do I do for that?”

“Death?” Dr. Kellin smirked. “Nothing.”

“You just reminded me that there’s a corollary to that formula.”

Alex sat up, interested.

“If you eliminate the impossible and nothing remains,” he said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and considering it.

“Yes?” Alex prompted.

“Then some part of the impossible, must be possible.”

The Deepest Grave by Harry Bingham

How does anyone think that ‘attempted murder’ counts the same as actual murder? They shouldn’t even call it ‘attempted’: that’s just a way to flatter failure. The crime is as close as you can get to the opposite of murder.

The thing is, if you kill someone in these extravagant ways, you’re usually trying to send a message. So when the Ku Klux Klan strung people up from trees, they were carefully sending a message. To black people: stay in your place. To white people: this is the way we run things here. None of that civil rights nonsense, or else… A loathsome message, brutally delivered. But clear. Horribly clear.

Owen is probably a good human being and one more likely to be summoned before the Holy Throne than I am, but, Lord help me, the man is boring. Just talking to him makes me want to push plastic forks into my eyes.

The man swears, disappears, then the snout of a shotgun emerges, and Bowen comes back towards me a lot faster than he left. We shelter behind the slab of a tombstone.

‘What now?’

I shake my head.

Nothing.

Shotgun versus shouting: shotgun wins. They teach you that in the police.

Two walls lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves. Katie starts looking at book titles. No reason, except that’s what people like me and Katie do when we walk into a room with books.

We talk to someone at Google about it. He sounds like a real human being–albeit a Californian one whose hair is probably full of sunshine and organic hair product.

Time.

The fourth dimension.

One of my favourite dimensions. One that brings all the good stuff, even if she brings more than her share of the crappy stuff too. But there are times she’s out of her depth. Times when she shunts one second into the void, over the edge of the present and away– then, blow it, the next second to come along looks exactly the same. And the next and the next.

Thousands of seconds, all alike.

He has that Metropolitan Police we- never- screw- up tone about him which is deeply comforting, until you remember that the Met screws up just as much as anyone else and maybe more.

Biting.

That sounds a bit girly, of course. Scratching, biting, pulling hair. Playground stunts that only girls ever pull. Girls with tears and bunches and grubby knees.

But there’s playground biting and real biting.

My fighting instructor, Lev, once told me that the human jaw can exert as much as a hundred kilos of force. I slightly doubt that my own pearly whites can inflict that much pressure, but they’re still handy. The trick– another of Lev’s much- reiterated nuggets– is to bite with the molars not the incisors. You get double or quadruple the amount of force, and the victim’s area of muscle damage is that much greater.

‘Take the biggest bite you can. Bite hard. And don’t stop. The more your man struggles, the more hurt you do.’

Wise advice.

A dog handler once told me that sniffer dogs aren’t recruited for their powers of smell. ‘They can all smell well enough. Asking them to follow a trail is like asking you to pick a red ball from a basket full of green ones. The only issue is whether the dog understands what you’re asking and feels like helping.’

On Eden Street by Peter Grainger

There are lines, and you cross them at your peril. But the closer one gets to them, the more wavy and broken those lines become. And the longer one does this job, the more the realization dawns that every investigation is unique–barely any of them fit the theories you’re taught in the lecture room.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)