ask me point blank

"Am I just some kind of a gauzy fruitcake? Am I just some kind of gullible freak who allows the core of his own being to be blown to the four winds?"

Crow T. Robot, MST3K, "Space Mutiny" (Season 9, Ep. 20)

here and now

The Paper Chase (1973)

authorial cop out

"I was dazzled, delighted. We spent a whole evening there, Maria sitting at our table and smoking, and it was all the Bohemian evenings I had ever read about."

Look at Me, Anita Brookner

"The old pattern still flourishes, because it was so complete, because everything here conspires to prolong it."

American Gigolo (1980)

Look at Me, Anita Brookner

"An interpretation of this is shown in our illustration of the Katsura Gardens in Japan (1636). The deepest layer is understood as the coarsest and the 'roughest' zone, while the levels as they rise become increasingly geometric and delicate. The topmost plane consists of a footpath made of square-cut paving stones. Pale in color and casually combined, they seem to 'float' over the dark background. The next level is created by a gutter of natural cobblestones imbedded in the lowest level, which is the soil itself. These graduated depths must, at the same time, be seen as a part of a greater whole. One is really not completely at the bottom until one reaches the water level to which the path leads, nor quite at the top before one enters the house with its geometric carpet pattern. This conception of the floor's span from top to bottom, from water and ground at the lowest level to the ordered geometry of the house at the highest level, is at the same time an interpretation of the difference between outside and inside. The outside bears the stamp of primeval nature, the inside is the seat of humanity and greatest perfection, a place 'in which the spirit alone prevails'."

"Texture and the Layer Effect," Archetypes in Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen

worth the wait

MAJOR GARLAND BRIGGS

bow-leg my knock-knees

Jason Marsden, "Eddie Munster"

greasy fingers

One From the Heart (1982)

turkey bits, spittle

he eats like an animal

"My wife's leaving me,"

says little Caesar,

"she doesn't think I'm enough,

she's gone out the door."

1982:

She's tangoing with Raul

on the Vegas Strip.

binding contracts (The Paper Chase, 1973)

living in the woods

The Paper Chase (1973)

"Contemplation is the discipline of piercing through the ego's self-centeredness and impatience. It may include enduring the boredom--sometimes for years--of waiting for God to show up." 

Entering the Castle: Finding the Inner Path to God and Your Soul's Purpose, Caroline Myss

"The secret vice! A whole new universe! Buttonholes! The manufacturers can't make ready-made suits with permanent buttonholes on the sleeves. The principle of ready-made clothes is that each suit on the rack can be made to fit about four different shapes of men. They makes the sleeves long and then the store has a tailor, an unintelligible little man who does alterations, chop them off to fit men with shorter arms and move the buttons up. 

And suddenly Ross found that as soon as you noticed this much, you started noticing the rest of it. Yes! the scyes, for example. The scyes! Imagine somebody like Ross knowing all the esoteric terminology. Ross is a good old boy, for god sake. The scyes! The scyes are the armholes in a coat. In ready-made clothes, they make the armholes about the size of the Holland Tunnel. Anybody can get in these coats. Jim Bradford, the former heavyweight weight-lifting champion, who has arms the size of a Chapman Valve fire hydrant, can put on the same coat as some poor bastard who is mooning away the afternoon at IBM shuffling memos and dreaming of going home and having a drink and playing with the baby..."

"The Secret Vice" The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe

dog-eared

"He had little of small change of conversation and rarely rose to reach down one of those ready-made forms and phrases that drape, whether fresh or frayed, the hooks and pegs of the general wardrobe of talk--that repository in which alone so many persons qualify for the discipline of society, as supernumerary actors prepare, amid a like provision, for the ordeal of the footlights."

"Well, it's just the sort of kindness," she smiled, "the kindness that costs nothing, the kindness you show to a child. It's as if you rather looked down on him. It's as if you don't respect him."

"Respect him? Why, respect's a big feeling. But I guess I do." 

"You guess? If you're not sure, it's no respect." 

The American, Henry James

Indecent Proposal (1993)

"...they met again several times and, without formally swearing an eternal friendship, fell, for their course of life, instinctively into step together."

The Escape Artist (1982)

"You're the first man about whom I've ever found myself saying, 'Oh, if I were he--!' It's singular, but so it is. I've known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain, yet they've never disturbed my inward peace. You've got something it worries me to have missed. It's not money, it's not even brains--though evidently yours have been excellent for your purpose. It's not your superfluous stature, though I should have rather liked to be a couple inches taller. It's a sort of air you have of being imperturbably, being irremovably and indestructibly (that's the thing!) at home in the world. ... My place in life had been made for me and it seemed easy to occupy. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have made and sold articles of vulgar household use--you strike me, in a fashion of your own, as a man who stands about at his ease and looks straight over ever so many high walls. I seem to see you move everywhere like a big stockholder on his favorite railroad...."

Henry James, The American

"He performed the movement frequent with him and which was always a symbol of his taking mental possession of a scene -- he extended his long legs."

and a little bit softer now

Bull Durham (1988)

"I like it."

The Big Fix (1978)

"Small, fluttery gestures that betray nervousness or a practiced overanimation are considered girlishly feminine and cute. Toying with a strand of hair, bobbing the head, giggling when introduced, pulling the elbows in close to the body and crossing the legs in a knee-and-ankle double twist are mannerisms that men studiously avoid. Self-contained and nonaggressive, they might almost be the equivalent of cringing, fleeing and fear-grinning among the lower primates.

...Clutching protectively at the throat is not restricted to females, but corresponding masculine gestures are to loosen the collar and adjust the necktie, actions which indicate some modicum of control."

"Movement", Femininity, Susan Brownmiller

La Lune dans le Caniveau, 1983

time travel's easy when you've got a harp

"I realized that we'd stopped and that the door was opening. A man climbed in, dropped his fare in the tin box, and sat down across the aisle with a casual uninterested glance at us... And I sat watching him from the corner of my eye, tense, excited, almost frightened at my first really close look at a living human being of the year 1882.

In some ways the sight of that ordinary man whom I never saw again is the most intensely felt experience of my life. There he sat, staring absently out the window, in an odd high-crowned black derby hat, a worn black short-length overcoat, his green-and-white-striped shirt..."

Time and Again, Jack Finney

short bread

"And then his body: there are such chairs in women's bedrooms, upholstered in pink satin, full of warm folds and dimples, alive -- you'd almost think they're ready to replace their mistresses. Doctor Voycheck twisted his red horns till they were even sharper and the familiar smile crept to his ears. But a moment later he was serious. Bending down, he laid his ear to the pink satin-covered body and felt the stomach. 

'Hm-m... Now, why didn't you say a word about it till now?'
'Well, I somehow... People have told me I was gaining weight. What is it?'
'What! We'll have to cut you up.' 

Dimples; frightened babes with thumbs in their mouths."

"The Miracle of Ash Wednesday," The Dragon: Fifteen Stories, Yevgeny Zamyatin