I think a cool thing to do would be to spend an entire day using ONLY Star Wars quotes.

Boom goes the dynamite

"... Only you can see then, Martin. You want to know why?"

"This is bullshit," Martin said.

"You've got the sight," Harrison said. "The third eye. The sixth sense."

"I don't see dead people," Martin said.

"No, you see worse. I've met people like you before. You have a talent. You don't need a gadget to make it work."

"Is there where you tell me to put away the targeting computer?"

-- We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory.

Quotent Quotables

"Sometimes you weren't yet the person you needed to be to do the the work you needed to do."

--City On Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg

American Twilight

America is not going to be destroyed!” he shouted passionately.

“Never?” prodded the old man softly.

“Well…” Nately faltered.

The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. His goading remained gentle. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so."

Nately squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, forever is a long time, I guess.”

“A million years?” persisted the old man with keen, sadistic zest. “A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with it’s fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as the… frog?”

So they had frogs and buckets in that galaxy but not barrels and fish? (Quotent Quotables)

This picture is from an actual article entitled "Frogs Can Help Make Milk
Stay Fresh Longer."  Here is the text of that article:
There used to be an old Russian wive's tale that if a
 frog jumped in your bucket of milk, it wouldn't go sour.
 As it turns out, that might be true because
 the peptides in frog's skin secretions are antibiotic.
 It also means that as more diseases become
 antibiotic resistant,
we might start turning to frog ooze to prevent infections.

Often in scifi and fantasy you'll see the author reminding you Hey this isn't your world it's a different one look how different they are tho like in this passage from Chuck Wendig's Star Wars: Aftermath: Life Debt: Superfluous Titles in which an alien bounty hunter is reflecting on how their attempt to free Kashyyyk*

The Empire— if those ships above even claim to be that, anymore— is now attempting to bomb this planet to oblivion. Already she knows how this will go: Many of the newly freed Wookiees are only peripherally free. Most are still trapped in settlements. Which means killing them will be as easy as firing a blaster into a bucket of frogs.

"Hmmm. Hmmm. Need a simile for something that's really easy to do. Something where the thing you're going after is just trapped there. Can't get out. Not fish in a barrel that's too quotidian. This is an alien planet. A long time ago. A galaxy far far away. Need to make sure they remember that. We're not down at the docks in San Diego here after all.  Nobody is shooting fish in a barrel. Who shoots fish anyway? Why is that the expression? And did they ever keep fish in a barrel?** I bet they didn't. No time to look it up now. Got to get this thing done. How about something more Star Warsy. Like blasters? Blasters are Star Wars. Like firing a blaster into... what would you fire a blaster into in Star Wars? ... ... ... like firing a blaster into a cantina full of Hutts... no, no... like firing a blaster into a energy globe of Gungans... no, wait, the memo said absolutely nothing that would remind someone of the prequels..."

"Hey, Dad, want to see my bucket of frogs?"

*BINGO*

____________________

*I had to look it up to remember that it was spelled with three ys. You wouldn't want to make the Wookies angry by misspelling their home planet. When Wookies get angry...

**Nobody is apparently sure where the expression 'shooting fish in a barrel' comes from***, but what you should know is that it's not the bullet that gets them, it's the acoustics: when you fire a bullet into the water of a barrel the shock wave of sound kills the fish. 

***If you go look up fish in a barrel on Wiktionary you'll see that another phrase for something that's easy is "duck soup."  Most people who write about this stuff say that "duck soup" has no clear origin as an expression for something that's really easy to do. But one commenter that I found traced the expression to a belief that Inuit make 'duck soup' by putting an entire duck into boiling water, feathers and all, and hence duck soup is easy to make.

Quotent Quotables: This is why I wouldn't have worked out as a scientist.

To set up the scene: two scientists are climbing into a tree platform to spend the night seeing if they can spot a tiger:


*****
A gust of wind bent the tree over and lifted a squad of ants into the air. One of them landed in Robichaud's eye and bit him, sinking its pincers into the soft tissue of the eyeball....

Robichaud was all but blinded by pain and tears. Although his tears had drowned the ant that bit him, the body of the ant still clung there, its mandibles buried in the white of his eye. It felt like a cheese grater on his sclera.  ... Duckworth tried to pluck out the ant.... but [his] thick fingers could not immediately grasp the ant, and they knew they could not continue without the headlamp. They had to blend completely with the quiet darkness lest they spook a returning tiger. ... Robichaud resigned himself to a night of misery.

******

-- The Last Unicorn, William DeBuys.

Oh come on! (Quotent Quotables)

One of the things you hear from Star Wars fans is "Return Of The Jedi would've been great if not for those Ewoks", because Ewoks were obviously cute and intended to make the already-huge toy market huger.

So the NEW Star Wars got rid of all that by being gritty and real and having everyone die in Rogue One and also Chewie finally apparently pulled someone's arms off, and then there's this scene with a Rebel soldier who got his leg blown off in a battle, as written in the second of the Star Wars prequel books by Chuck Wendig. The soldier has just learned he's got to go for therapy and can't go back to war, when the doctor leaves and comes back with his 'prescription.'

A mischievous twinkle shines in her eye as she leaves. Dade sits there for a while, tapping his new metal toes on the floor— cl-cl-click, cl-cl-click— when she returns to the room. A droid follows close behind. This droid is unlike one he’s ever seen before. It’s got a clunky, squarish head, but it rolls around slowly on a blue-and-gold ball-shaped body. Smaller than your standard astro-droid— this one only sits about knee-high. It warbles and blurps at him, focusing a pair of ocular lenses on him as it juggles its own head, which sits improbably upon its body like a box balanced poorly on a child’s ball. The droid tries to stay balanced as its head dips dangerously to the side.
“What is this?” he asks. 
“It’s a droid, Dade.” 
“Yeah, Doc, I see that, but why is there a droid here?” 
“This is QT-9. He is your droid.”

At least Lucas didn't call the Ewoks "Teddy Soldiers."

Quotent Quotables: The cool thing to do would be to say "And that sums up 2016" but the COOLER thing to do would be to say what I could do and then claim I'm not doing it even though kind of by saying I COULD do it I did it so I get credit either way. (Got all that?)

From The Vision: Little Worse Than A Man.

Quotent Quotables: Even after reading it I'm not sure whether I totally liked the book...

But I know I don't like this:

Cynthia Jalter took my shoulder and turned me toward her, then drew her hair back and leaned forward. Her features were arranged in a special shape, a shape I recognized. She put her face against mine. A kiss.  The sticky part of her face found mine, and they oscillated together.

- As She Climbed Across The Table, Jonathan Lethem.

Add caption

Quotent Quotables: Yes, I suppose it would be.

Brad narrowed his eyes. “Wait a sec,” he said. “This isn’t the thing about being eaten by the lions again, is it?”

“It will always be the thing about being eaten by the lions, Brad. From here on in, until it occurs.”

-- From Torn Apart, And Devoured By Lions, Jeffrey Wells (in the Machine Of Death anthology.)

Quotent Quotables: Love is like this small room...

Love is like this small room where a child brings you to show you all their treasures. First the child shows you all the new toys that are bright and shiny and top of the line. But then she shows you all the stuff that has ended up at the bottom of the trunk. There are dolls with eyes that wobble, hair that is falling out of their heads, and dirt behind their ears. Their fingertips have been chewed off by dogs and they have been drawn on with ballpoint pen. It has been so long since they have been held or anyone has told them that they are lovely. They lie at the bottom of the toy chest, hidden and ashamed. You are either going to be disgusted by them, or you are going to be so filled with love for them that your heart almost breaks.

I took  his hand in mine.

-- The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O'Neill.

Quotent Quotables

If you can't be honest with your best friend's vampire boyfriend, who can you be honest with?

-- Get In Trouble: Stories, by Kelly Link.

Quotent Quotables

As they came around the wide hips of the steel burner, Patricia was reminded of the house she’d grown up in, with the bones of the spice warehouse around her. And then she came around the other side, and saw what was different about the furnace. It had a great iron face looking into the cinder-block darkness, and it was weeping ashes.

“Don’t touch it,” Carmen said, walking deeper into the cellar without sparing the agonized metal face a second glance.

“Why not?” Patricia rushed to catch up. 

“Because it’s hot,” Carmen said. “It’s a furnace.”

-- All The Birds In The Sky, Charlie Jane Anders.

Quotent Quotables

Coincidence undermines a story's credibility. 

There's only one area in which we accept coincidence, and that is in reality. "Such a coincidence!" we say, and then we dish up a juicy anecdote in which coincidence plays a major role.

-- Dear Mr. M, Herman Koch.

Quotent Quotables: Next time I'll tell you about other gross problems I've had.

It was so hot you could hear the mayonnaise go bad.
-- Hungry, from "Thunderstruck, And Other Stories" by Elizabeth McCracken.
______________

Three times in my life I've eaten mayonnaise that's gone bad. The first time time was when we took a family trip to South Dakota as kids, and we had some food in a cooler to eat lunch with at a park. The mayo had turned, as they say, and we ate some and everyone got a bit sick. That trip wasn't memorable for that, but it was memorable for my mom expressing bitter disappointment in us kids when we visited Spearfish Falls, and she wanted us to go under the waterfall for a picture. The water was extremely cold, and we didn't want to, so we complained our way through the picture.

The other time was on Xmas Eve, when I went to my brother Bill's house the year he was going to host. Xmas Eve was a big deal in our family, and I'm not sure why Bill got to host it that year; traditionally, when we were kids, the event had traded back and forth between my parents and my Uncle Joe's house, as he and my mother engaged in a fierce rivalry to be the head of the family after my grandma died.

Bill had made some dip that he served in a bread bowl. I arrived in the afternoon and ate some, and then got violently sick on the way back to my 1-room apartment in the bad part of town. Later, I asked him how long the dip had been out. He said since the morning.

The third time was my fault. In law school, they'd been handing out free sandwiches for some group, and I took one (it was wrapped), put it in my backpack and later on transferred it to my 'fridge in my apartment in the bad part of town. The next morning I had it for breakfast, and it must have spoiled while in my backpack, because I got supersick again. Sweetie, who I was just dating then, came all the way from her house (about 60 miles away) to help take care of me. She always said I couldn't have had food poisoning because I either did, or didn't, have a fever. I don't remember which it was but whatever condition I had, Sweetie said was the opposite of food poisoning.

In the story, [SPOILER ALERT!] a grandma is taking care of a her granddaughter because the girl's dad -- grandma's son -- is in the hospital. The girl doesn't eat the mayo, but while they're at the party the dad dies in the hospital. Either way, mayo at a party seems like it's a bad sign.

As further proof of the evil qualities of mayo, consider this: when I first began dating Sweetie, I went to Thanksgiving at her parent's house, and I brought with me a can of jellied cranberries, my second-favorite thing about Thanksgiving. I suspect that my mother-in-law saw that as an insult, and has been trying to passive-aggressively pay me back since then for the (perceived) insult. (I only brought them because Sweetie said she made her own cranberry sauce, and I thought everyone [mostly me] should also have some that came from a can).

One year, she handed me a plate of what looked like jellied cranberries and said "Oh here, try some." When I got suspicious because serving canned cranberries was out of her nature I said What are they?

"Beets," she said, and I passed.

Another year, even worse, she presented a Jell-O (TM) mold, cranberry colored with white cream in the middle and orange flecks here and there.  "It's cranberry Jell-O" she said. "I figured you'd like it."

I started to serve myself some and asked what the orange flecks were.  "They're carrots," she said, before admitting that the center of the mold, the white stuff, was mayonnaise.

Quotent Quotables: Obviously I am being sarcastic, as it is not "VERY" Christian at all but only a little Christian.

When the hour is too late for rescue it is still early enough for revenge.

-- The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

_______________

The Buried Giant takes place in a period between Briton and Saxon wars. In real life, in an effort to reduce the brutality of existence back then, the concept of wergild was created. Under wergild, everything was given a value -- property and life were both valued -- and if you stole something, or killed someone, you were supposed to pay the price of that person to the victim or the victim's family. (Murder and manslaughter both cost the same in case you were wondering.)  Generally speaking, the power elite were worth anywhere from 1 and 1/2 times to 6 times the value of a regular person; so, just like modern life.

(If you're a Tolkien fan, the One Ring was taken by Isildur as wergild.)

Wergild was supposed to replace blood revenge, which is actually a very codified form of ritual feud. Wergild in fact did replace blood revenge for a while... until Christianity came along and replaced wergild with the very Christian concept of capital punishment.

Capital punishment has always been controversial. Charles Dickens once wrote about the direct relationship between executions and increases in crime: crime goes up when public executions occur. In response to this, the British government began executing criminals behind closed doors.

Nowadays, countries in which the majority of people support the death penalty include China, South Africa... and of course the very Christian United States.

Quotent Quotables: You know, I don't remember the story very well but I'm pretty sure the squid had a crush on Queequeg.

"I am serious, what does love have to do with anything we do all day long?"

"Well, that's what he'd better work out," Ish says, "If he wants anyone to read his book."

"There are plenty of good stories without love."

"Like what?"

I think for a moment. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea."

-- The Mark And The Void, Paul Murray.

(Quotent Quotables)

"I wasn't some unserious church girl from Nebraska, who had only ever handled pet-store geckos, or some inlander, "Rebecca" or "Mary," a pigtailed zoo volunteer.  The kind of girl who liked to do those drugstore paint-by-number watercolors of horses.  Shetland ponies. Palominos. I bet the Marys were really excellent at that."

-- from Swamplandia! by Karen Russell



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