Post an excerpt.

And he would go to picture galleries they said and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.

To the Lighthouse

My breasts, if it is not too bold a figure to call so two hard, firm, rising hillocks, that just began to shew themselves, or signify anything to the touch, employ'd and amus'd her hands a-while, till, slipping down lower, over a smooth track, she could just feel the soft silky down that had but a few months before put forth and garnish'd the mount-pleasant of those parts, and promised to spread a grateful shelter over the seat of the most exquisite sensation, and which had been, till that instant, the seat of the most insensible innocence. Her fingers play'd and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss, which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament.

Fanny Hill

the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman
going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was
a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Ulysses.

Do not post the following outside of /b/: Trolls, flames, racism, off-topic replies, uncalled for catchphrases, macro image replies, indecipherable text (meaning "lol u tk him 2da bar|?"), or anthropomorphic ("furry") images."

do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good.  his life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours.  were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

Letters to a Young Poet

där på solfläckens barnhem
bodde några av dem
sådana som såg lite konstiga ut
de kunde vara lite fyrkantiga med håret på ända
och glodde man på dem blev det visst två dagars väta
ett spöregnet stod väl säkert i deras tjänst
det regnade över tomater de stal från sina odlare i närheter
om man kanske hade glott för mycket på dem
kom de senare för att hedersamt tomata dig till ketchup
av alla knep de kunde, målade de en sol
drog en båge upp eller nedan blev det sol eller mulet surt till
där dog även tomatplantan i glasskärvornas regn,
glaset som skar ett hål i själva betraktelsen
och de från solfläckens barnhem glodde i sin tur på dig ut
tittade där på dig slutlig

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me

that's from rebecca!!!!!!

>>8
Yup - an intarnet winnar is you!  Often quoted as the best opening line for a novel ever written.

I, Sinuhe, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this. I do not write it to the glory of the gods in the land of Kem, for I am weary of gods, nor to the glory of the Pharaohs, for I am weary of their deeds. I write neither from fear nor from any hope of the future but for myself alone. During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am of weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come.

"Wicked Sisters," said Jean, as he let the hatchets fall out of his right robe sleeve and into his hand, "I'd like you to meet the Wicked Sisters.". . . Without a word between them, the Berangias sisters took to their heels and rushed as him, four knives gleaming.  It was their own professionalism that saved Jean this time.  He knew before it happened that one would feint and one would strike home.  The sister on the left, the one with the broken nose, attacked a split second before the one on the right. . .There was a wet crack, and she hit the floor hard, knives falling from her nerveless fingers.

For him love was more like the calm, smoldering ember that gives off an even heat from its soft bed of ashes and in the muted twilight tenderly forgets what is distant and makes what is near seem twice as close and twice as intimate.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.


...and that is all I've been bothered to read through even though I class that as one of my favourite books. Cookies for anyone who's read through all of it and actually understood it.

It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee Hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. "Augrh!" said Father Wolf, "it is time to hunt again." And he was going to spring downhill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: "Good luck go with you, 0 Chief of the Wolves; and good luck and strong white teeth go with the noble children, that they may never forget the hungry in this world. "

It was the jackal -- Tabaqui the Dish-licker -- and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than anyone else in the jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of anyone, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. We call it hydrophobia,but they call it dewanee -- the madness -- and run.

"Enter, then, and look," said Father Wolf, stiffly, "but there is no food here."

"For a wolf, no," said Tabaqui, "but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the Jackal-People], to pick and choose?" He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat cracking the end merrily.

"All thanks for this good meal," he said, licking his lips. "How beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of kings are men from the beginning."

Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces; and it pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.

Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made, and then he said spitefully:

"Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me."

Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Wainganga River, twenty miles away.

"He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily. "By the Law of the jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles, and I -- I have to kill for two, these days."

"His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing," said Mother Wolf, quietly. "He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now the villagers of the Wainganga are angry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our children must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very grateful to Shere Khan!"

"Shall I tell him of your gratitude?" said Tabaqui.

"Out!" snapped Father Wolf. "Out and hunt with thy master. Thou hast done harm enough for one night."

"I go," said Tabaqui, quietly. "Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message."

Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.

"The fool!" said Father Wolf. "To begin a night's work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Wainganga bullocks?"

a

-The House of Leaves

"Then in the dead of the night, as he lay wondering what the thing was up to, for it had been so quiet, he heard suddenly a great pounding at his door. He was in terror. He knew he shouldn't answer, that the knocking didn't come from a human hand. But finally he could bear it no longer. He said his prayers; he threw open the door. And what he beheld was the horror of horrors - the rotted mummy of his father, the filthy wrappings in tatters, propped against the garden wall.

"Of course, he knew there was no life in the shruken face or dead eyes that stared at him. Someone or something had unearthed the corpse from its desert mastaba and brought it there. And this was the body of his father, putrid, stinking; the body of his father, which by all things holy, should have been consumed in a proper funeral feast by Khayman and his brothers and sisters.

"Khayman sank to his knees weeping, half screaming. And then, before his unbelieving eyes, the thing moved! The thing began to dance! Its limbs were jerked hither and thither, the wrappings breaking to bits and pieces, until Khayman ran into the house and shut the door against it. And then the corpse was flung, pounding its fist it seemed, upon the door, demanding entrance.

- Ann Rice's Queen of the Damned (AKA Dance of the Mummies)

>>16

In before Lestat will make you gay.

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.

Most of the girls, as they walked along, seemed to be absorbed in silent prayer; but he supposed, on second thought, it was only gum that they were thus incessantly ruminating. Gum, not God.

After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, Aldous Huxley

70

Mizuho Inada (Female Student No. 1) cautiously looked out from the shade of the bushes. Due to the relentless rain her neatly cropped hair stuck to her forhead.

Beyond the bushes there was a narrow farm field, and through the light sheet of rain she saw the back side of a school coat in the middle of the field. His slicked-back hair was also wet from the rain. It was Kazuo Kiriyama (Male Student No. 6).

Kazuo Kiriyama had formed what appeared to be two piles of branches. Now he sat arranging one of the piles.

Mizuho calmed her breathing. It was cold, and she was tired, but she didn't really mind. After all, she was about to execute her most important mission...

...as a space warrior.

Are you ready, warrior Prexia Dikianne Mizuho?

In her mind, the God of Light Ahura Mazda asked her this. Apparently, this voice came from the spindle-shaped magic crystal (in fact the mail order item was made from glass but Mizuho believed it was crystal) she wore.

Of course. Mizuho responded. I saw that demon walk away after killing Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano. I lost track of him, but just found him. And I saw him kill that other demon who killed Kayoko Kotohiki. I must defeat this enemy. And I have followed him this far.

Very well then. So you understand your mission?

Of course, sir. I recieved your message from the local fortune teller, that I would become a warrior destined to fight evil. I didn't understand what it meant at the time. But now, now I understand completely.

Very well then. Are you not scared?

No, sir. With your guidance I have nothing to fear.

Very well then. You are a surviving member of the Holy Dikianne Tribe. You are a chosen warrior. The light of victory will shine upon you soon. Hm? What is it?

No, no. It's just that, great Aharu Mazda, my fellow warrior, Lausasse Kaori was killed (in their former Class B classroom, Kaori Minami, who spent some time hanging out with Mizuho Inada, would restrain herself from yawning every time Mizuho told her, "You're the warrior Lorela," but whatever). She...

She fought to the very end, Mizuho.

Ah. Oh, I thought so. But, but, she was defeated by the evil forces.

Uh, well, yes. Well, that was because she was a mere commoner in origins. You are different. In any case, let's not fuss over the details. The important thing is that you must fight for her sake. And you must win. All right?

Yes, sir.

Okay then. The light. You must have faith in the cosmic light. The light that engulfs you.

The light grew inside her. The great warm cosmic power that encompassed everything.

Mizuho nodded again in her brief response. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Then she pulled the double-bladed knife (when she found the weapon in her day pack she thought it most becoming for a warrior) out of its sheath. She held it up in front of her face. A white light covered the blue blade, and Mizuho looked at Kazuo beyond the light.

She saw Kazuo's back. It was wide open.

Now then. You must cut down the enemy!

Yes!

In order to keep quiet, Mizuho dodged the bushes and dashed towards Kazuo. A light burst out from the short blade that had been barely fifteen centimeters in length, and it suddenly transformed into a legendary sword at least one meter long. This sword of light would pierce the evil monster in a single thrust.

As Kazuo Kiriyama adjusted the branches with his left hand, his right hand calmly pulled out the Beretta M92F. Without even turning around, he reached around and pulled the trigger twice.

The first shot hit Mizuho in the chest, stopping her, and the second shot went right through her head.

Mizuho fell back as her wounds burst into gently curved red lines drawn through the air. The rain immediately began washing away the blood. Then the warrior Prexia Dikianne Mizuho's soul transmigrated to the Land of Light.

His back still facing her, Kazuo Kiriyama put away his gun and continued arranging the branches.

4 students remaining.

"To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don't let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can't see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That's where it is. Right at this moment. But don't look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead take an even deeper one. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it's going to hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails?, don't worry, that particular detail doesn't matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms - you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book - you won't have time to even scream.

Don't look.

Of course I looked.

I looked so fucking fast I should of ended up wearing one of those neck braces for whiplash."

He’d whammed the furniture: those were his furniture-whamming days.  What Crake had to say was this: “Jimmy, look at it realistically.  You can’t couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely.  Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end.  He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources.  In other words—and up to a point, of course—the less we have, the more we fuck.”

    “How do you account for that?” said Jimmy.

    “Imagination,” said Crake.  “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac.  A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that.  Take birds—in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all.  They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better.  But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.”

    “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?”

    “You could call it hope.  That, or desperation.”

    “But we’re doomed without hope, as well,” said Jimmy.

    “Only as individuals,” said Crake cheerfully.

    “Well, it sucks.”

    “Jimmy, grow up.”

    Crake wasn’t the first person who’d ever said that to Jimmy.

"O illustrious person," said Kai Lung very earnestly, "this is evidently an unfortunate mistake. Doubtless you were expecting some exalted Mandarin to come and render you homage, and were preparing to overwhelm him with gratified confusion by escorting him yourself to your well-appointed abode. Indeed, I passed such a one on the road, very richly apparelled, who inquired of me the way to the mansion of the dignified and upright Lin Yi. By this time he is perhaps two or three li towards the east."

"However distinguished a Mandarin he may be, it is fitting that I should first attend to one whose manners and accomplishments betray him to be of the Royal House," replied Lin Yi, with extreme affability. "Precede me, therefore, to my mean and uninviting hovel, while I gain more honour than I can reasonably bear by following closely in your elegant footsteps, and guarding your Imperial person with this inadequate but heavily-loaded weapon."

>>23

Oh lawd, is dat sum Chung Kuo?

Because David Wingrove sucks donkey droppings.

It's from Barry Hughart. Highly recommended.

It's neither, it's from Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung books.

Hah, owned.

"...his mother in tears was mourning
and laid the fold of her bosom bare and with one hand held out
a breast, and wept her tears for him and called to him in winged words:
'Hektor, my child, look upon these and obey, and take pity
on me, if ever I gave you the breast to quiet your sorrow."

Late that night, his lips torn and his neck scratched, his back bearing scars, Big Gobi staggered into a train bound for Tokyo, a veteran of the campaigns on the Yokohama waterfront, that narrow strip of land where hordes of invading sailors streamed ashore every night to do battle with a handful of brave whores.

The ferocious adventurers came from every corner of the world. There were Burmans and Chadians and Quechuas and Lapps and Georgians swearing in a hundred tongues and brandishing a thousand varied weapons, every conceivable kind of knife and pick and sword and bludgeon and pike. Between them they were missing every part of the human body. They had warts in every combination supplemented by a multitude of tattoos and moles, birthmarks, miscellaneous discolorings, and wounds both old and new, generally treated but often only recently scabbed. They were a desperate army with only one goal, a night of unlimited plunder after weeks at sea.

Darkness fell, the late sunset of a summer night. Children waved good-bye to the pretty ships in the harbor, crowds moved from the department stores to the movie theaters. Strollers ate cold noodles. It was a peaceful evening in downtown Yokohama with a cooling breeze off the bay.

And yet no more than two miles away the battle was ready to begin. Some fifty or sixty Japanese heroines were preparing to defend the homeland against the combined navies of the world.

The gangplanks came down, the launches sped back and forth. The first wave of barbarians swarmed into pawnshops snatching up cameras and silk jackets, raced down the streets through the whining music, climbed over the crashing chairs, and hurtled the bottles shattering in the alleys. The massed squadrons pushed forward, regrouped, mounted another assault. Heads cracked on the pavement, bellies spilled out in doorways. The sailors fought on their backs and rolled over to strike again from the side, from above, from below, in between, in back, knee level, naval level, chest level, eye level, from the rooftops and the tops of chairs and toilet bowls.

But gradually their ranks thinned, their bodies piled up on the docks and jetties. A few snipers still carried on in upstairs windows, but long before sunrise the outcome of the battle was decided.

Here and there a whore lay temporarily unconscious, but most were walking home on their own sturdy legs, limping perhaps, certainly exhausted, but with their sea chests bulging with money from around the world. Behind them they left carnage and ruin, snoring carcasses from a hundred distant ports, the broken lust of foreigners. Once again a handful of heroines had won total victory in the nightly Yokohama battle, and all over Japan innocent women and children were able to sleep safely because of it.

   "Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had a stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up."

-- the paragraph that made me buy a copy of Lolita.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

---------------------------------------------------------

BIX NOOD MUHFUGGAH

-opening quote from Uncle Tom's Cabin

---------------------------------------------------------

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

"Forever Overhead" by David Foster Wallace. When I read this story, I immediately fell in love with his work.

296
The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness of the sad.  Just as the normal man talks nonsense and slaps others ont he bck out of zest and vitality, so those incapable of joy and enthusiasm do somersaults in their minds and perform, in their own cold way, the warm gestures of life.

343 A Day (Zigzag)
...What remains at the end of this day is what remained yesterday and will remain tomorrow: the boundless, insatiable longing to be always the same and other.
    Com down from your unreality by the steps of my dreams and fatigues.  Come down and replace the world.

                                       The Book of Disquiet
                                         -Fernando Pessoa

By this furious flurry
what just won't desist.
a pang--
             Sam.
Somehow too amoung this
unslackening stream of thriving shit
       untossed--
Sam. On his own. Lost.
So even with Them, their clotted
loathing regrouping to covet my
supreme Fame, I wonder of his Green Eyes with Flecks of Gold.
                                     --He's around.
                             Rosy Pussytoes bold.
But then Them returns.
     Where's his curvy moptop?
I blunder until teeming Hordes
resurge, pawing my rear, splittling
my lips, clawing my nipples raw. I
don't and uncurl revenge.
I'm their only World.
                           Where's his smile?

>>18

Is that from Perfume?

Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree whose mortal Taste
Brought Death into the world, and all our Woe,
With loss of Eden till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse!

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

-Gravity's Rainbow

everything has  its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came  down upon him for the funeral expenses

Jerome k Jerome

When all is in harmony the army can withstand natural attacks and those that appear supernatural.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In the house on Paper Street, a police detective started calling about my condominium explosion, and Tyler stood with his chest against my shoulder, whispering into my ear while I held the phone to the other ear, and the detective asked if I knew anyone who could make dynamite.
"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution."
I told the detective that it was the refridgerator that blew up my condo.
"I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greatest power of my spirit."
The dynamite, the detective said, there were impurities, a residue of ammonium oxalate and potassium perchloride that might mean the bomb was homemade, and the dead bolt on the front door was shattered.
I said I was in Washington, D.C., that night.
The detective on the phone explained how someone had sprayed a cinister of Freon into the dead-bolt lock and then tapped the lock with a cold chisel to shatter the cylinder. This is the way criminals are stealing bicycles.
"The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."
The detective said whoever set the homemade dynamite could've turned on the gas and blown out the pilot lights on the stove days before the explosion took place. The gas was just the trigger. It would take days for the gas to fill the condo before it reached the compressor at the base of the refridgerator and the compressor's electronic motor set of the explosion.
"Tell him," Tyler whispered. "Yes, you did it. You blew it all up. That's what he wants to hear."

"Ford" he said "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

"And who who looks at another woman so that he desires her will deny his Faith and shall not have the Spirit; and if he does not repent, he shall be cast out."

It was not that Fuchsia did not struggle against her mounting melancholia. But the black moods closing in on her ever more frequently were becoming too much for her.
The emotional, loving, moody child had had small chance of developing into a happy woman. Had she as a girl been naturally joyous yet all that had befallen her must surely have driven away the bright birds, one by one, from her breast. As it was, made of a more sombre clay, capable of a deeper happiness, but more easily drawn to the dark than the light, Fuchsia was even more open to the cruel winds of circumstance which seemed to have singled her out for particular punishment.
Her need for love had never been fulfilled; her love for others had never been suspected, or wanted. Rich as a dusky orchard, she had never been discovered. Her green boughs had been spread, but no travellers came and rested in their shade nor tasted the sweet fruit.
With her mind for ever turning to the past, Fuchsia could see nothing but the ill-starred progress of a girl who was, in spite of her title and all it implied of little consequence in the eyes of the castle, a purposeless misfit of a child, hapless and solitary. Her deepest loves had been for her old nurse Nannie Slagg, for her brother, for the doctor and in a strange way for Flay. Nannie Slagg and Flay were both dead; Titus had changed. They loved one another still but a wall of cloud lay between them, something neither had the power to dispel.
There was still Dr Prune. But he had been so heavily overworked since the flood that she had not seen him. The desire to see the last of her true friends had weakened with every black depression. When she most needed the counsel and love of the doctor, who would have left the world bleeding to help her, it was then that she froze within herself and locking herself away, became ill with the failure of her life, the frustration of her womanhood, and tossing and turning in her improvised bedroom twelve feet above the flood, conceived for the first time, the idea of suicide.
What was the darkest of causes for so terrible a thought it is hard to know. Her lack of love; her lack of a father or a real mother? Her loneliness. The ghastly disillusion when steerpike was unmasked, and the horror of her having been fondled by a homicide. The growing sense of her own inferiority. In everything but rank. There were many causes, any of which might have been alone sufficient to undermine the will of tougher natures than Fuchsia’s.
When the first concept of oblivion flickered through her mind, she raised her head from her arms. She was shocked and she was frightened. But she was excited also.
She walked unsteadily to the window. Her thought had taken her into a realm of possibility so vast,  awe-inspiring, final and noiseless that her knees went weak and she glanced over her shoulder although she knew herself to be alone with her door locked against the world.
When she reached the window she stared out across the water, but nothing that she saw affected her thought or made any kind of visual impression on her.
All she knew was that she felt weak, that she was not reading about all this in a tragic book but that it was true. It was true that she was standing at a window and she had thought of killing herself. She clutched her hands together over her heart and a fleeting memory of how a young man had appeared at another window many years ago and had left a rose behind him on her table, passed through her mind and was gone.
It was all true. It wasn’t any story. But she could still pretend. She would pretend that she was the kind of person that would not only think of killing herself so that the pain in her heart would be gone forever, but the kind of person who would know how to do it, and be brave enough.
And as she pondered, she slid moment be moment even deeper into a world of make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative girl of many years ago, aloft in her secret life. She had become somebody else. She was someone who was young and beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person do? Why, such a person would stand upon this windowsill above this water. And … she … would … and as the child in her was playing the oldest game in the world, her body, following the course of her imagination, had climbed of the sill of the window where it stood with its back to the room.
For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked back into a sudden consciousness of the world – by the sound of someone knocking upon her room, it is impossible to know, but starting at the sound and finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so that she fell striking her dark head on the sill as she passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drowned her at its ease.

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promotory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this mighty o'rehanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire; why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, how like an angel in aprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the world, paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dusk. Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither.

-Hamlet