Here’s a collection of my favorite phrases/sentences/paragraphs from last month that I haven’t already used for something. (I probably will skip audiobooks, my transcription skills aren’t what they should be).
Apparently, the theme for January is: Coffee.
Family Business by S. J. Rozan
I’d have snorted, but that’s my mother’s signature response, and I’m trying to avoid it.
“I’ve spent the afternoon online trying to look under Jackson Ting’s rocks, and I can’t even find his rocks.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
“You’re the more experienced investigator in this partnership, and I’m always trying to learn from you.”
Not that Chinatown doesn’t still have corruption, self-dealing, and general evil. But now it’s more like everywhere else.”
“Meaning?”
“Small-time crime’s still all over the place—illegal gambling, people getting mugged, merchants cheating customers—but the big-ticket stuff has gotten more… abstract. Cerebral. White collar. And more integrated with the rest of the city. Your corruption is now our corruption.”
“The melting pot, a beautiful thing.”
“Ah. Now there you might be onto something.”
“I’m not just a pretty face, you know. In fact I’m not any kind of a pretty face.”
“Fishing for compliments never works.”
“It does when you do it.”
“Because I deserve them.”
Bloodlines by Peter Hartog
EVI [Engineered Virtual Intellect] controlled everything, right down to the lunch menu. To some, it was scary, but the machines hadn’t taken over just yet.
I had no idea what they were waiting for.
I live by a few simple rules, one of which is when someone offers you coffee, you say yes. Unless that someone is trying to kill you, in which case you accept the coffee under advisement.
Adding caffeine to my frayed nerves was probably not one of my brightest ideas. I had a penchant for collecting bad habits and decided not to turn a new leaf just then.
“What do you know of genetic resequencing and engineering?” Besim asked.
“About as much as the next guy,” I replied. “Meaning, nothing.”
Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire
“Heroism is addictive. Mybe that’s why it sounds so much like ‘heroin.'”
Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron
“We bend the rules of the universe on a daily basis. Presumptuousness is the base line for entry.”
He should be focusing on how to appease his own family so he could remain alive and uneaten, not worrying about his conscience. Real dragons didn’t have consciences, anyway. His certainly hadn’t done him any good.
Beside him, Svena was observing the back and forth with the sort of bored impatience of a sports caster watching a veteran boxer taking on a volunteer from the audience.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkein
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby by Ace Atkins
The coffee tasted as if it had been made fresh in the last week or two. But I drank it anyway.
Reconstruction by Mick Herron
Some days, it would be better if you’d stayed in bed.
No, there was a level deeper than that—some days it would be better if, the night before, you’d reached some previously unattainable plateau of drunkenness; a level at which you didn’t simply sleep through the following day, but it didn’t technically exist—it was a hole in your calendar, forever out of reach.
Even now, with rush hour fading, people piled past like lemmings. Which, she’d lately read, weren’t the suicidal types legend painted; the abrupt declines in their population less to do with mass clifftop dives than with hungry predators—arctic foxes, owls and the like. Which was more realistic, but disappointing too. Suicide had been the one thing everyone knew about lemmings. Now it turned out they didn’t even have that going for them. If they weren’t depressed before, that should do it.
How to Save a Superhero by Ruth Freeman
“You’ve had lots of adventures for someone your age,” said Ms. Swift quietly, “maybe not all bad, but not all good either. You know, I think that’s why I came to love books so much. When I was young, I wasn’t very happy. My parents were older and very strict. They didn’t have much time for me, but I found I could always go somewhere else, somewhere wonderful, between the covers of a book. And one of my very favorite places was the world of the river in this book [The Wind in the Willows].”
The Jackals by Adam Shaw
In hindsight, I probably should have noted that this meant to stay away, but clues aren’t easy to pick up on when you’re twenty-two.
Word traveled from one person to another like head lice or fleas…
Next to one of them sits a small Power Rangers action figure I snuck up there when we moved. Despite Lauren checking on those plants every day, it took her three months to notice it. As a reward, she said, I could keep it up there.
The coffee comes at me like a drunk aunt coming in for a kiss at a family reunion, and it hits me like a hot slap to the face.
(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)
An Interview with 
Grab a book, any book.
