Sorcery & Cecelia or The Enchanted Pot: being the correspondence of Two Young
Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
"'Practice your dancing. With enough study you might attain a degree of proficiency.'
'What a rude thing to say!' I replied. 'I would practice, but practice requires a partner.'
He smiled with such a degree of cynicism I almost expected his teeth to glint metallic. 'You won't lack for partners now. I've made Sally Jersey give me a waltz with you. Everyone will be agog to find out why.'
'Don't you want to know what I'm going to tell them?' I asked.
'Oh, they won't ask, don't think it. No, they'll dance with you and then say I am justly called mysterious,' he said."
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
“‘I have often prayed for the goddess to touch my heart,’ said the Mother’s comptroller. ‘It is my highest spiritual goal to see Her face-to-face. Indeed, I often think I have felt Her, from time to time.’ Anyone who desires to see the gods face-to-face is a great fool, thought Ista. Although that was not an impediment, in her experience.
‘You don’t have to pray to do that,’ said the divine. ‘You just have to die. It’s not hard.’ He rubbed his second chin. ‘In fact, it’s unavoidable.’
‘To be god-touched in life,’ corrected the comptroller coolly. ‘That is the great blessing we all long for.’
No, it’s not. If you saw the Mother’s face right now, woman, you would drop weeping in the mud of this road and not get up for days.”
And other random quotes:
"Timmy! YOU can be my sycophant!" “You crashed! That was spectacular! Do it again!”
"I do my best thinking in the shower, so now that we don't have very much water I don't get much thinking done."
“You need to take a lesson from your bellybutton, here.” “Don’t be nice, except in the nontechnical, everyday sense.”
“Anyone who telepathically prints Ariels for fun has problems.”
“Oh, except it would be better if I caught one, for my bug collection.” on the proper treatment of bedbugs
“It’s early in the morning and I’m a linguist. I’m supposed to be annoying!”
“How many disembodied heads do you have acquaintance with?”
“It’s possible to like something without shoving your head inside of it.”
“I will run semantic circles around your dizzy little head!”
“If you use your brain in this class, it really helps.”
“I would not try to clean up Shelob with a roll of toilet paper!”
“I do not want to be a seductive rodent!”
“I like pi + i because it’s kind of like me: it’s complex… it has rational and irrational parts… and the rational part is imaginary.”
“Whoa, flamingoes! We can’t go that way.”
“You can’t do Dr. Seuss, classical music, and martial arts all at the same time!”
“I feel like you’re a CD.” –after I told her a couple Japanese phrases
“Shooting government bureaucrats would be an effective way to reduce government waste.” –from a conversation on the importance of militias.
“Gaaa! More ‘Lakme Indian Fashion Week!’”
“Well you did a search for ‘Lakme,’ what did you expect?”
“When you put it that way, maybe I am a towel.”
“Don’t mock my diabolikility!”
“You do love me. You’re willing to break a laptop over my head.”
“Hopefully we’ll get there… Hence my use of a concise way of saying, ‘I hope and expect that.’”
“What’s the other one that’s just ‘I hope?’ Oh. ‘I hope.’”
“She picked it up and went, ‘Oh, poor snail, its shell cracked!’ and then it started bubbling!
“Now your fingers are toasty warm. Toast with bubbling snails on top.”
“It’s a good thing I’m not a fallacy so I’m not dumb.”
“Now see, we can just Photoshop out your body…”
"Who knew that the mark of the Beast was a glorified alarm?"
"The doctor then asked me if I ever felt like I had bugs crawling all over me. I counted to ten, and then I said very calmly, 'I live in the jungle. If I feel like I have bugs crawling on me, I usually do.' " –seen on Sharon’s blog
“Black helicopters have to do with syllable structure?”
“We’ve talked about the what, and we’ve talked about how the what happens, and now we’re going to talk about why the what happens… We will actually start using real words. Shortly.”
“We borrowed the names of Santa’s reindeer from German. Donner and Blitzen, lightning and thunder.”
“That sounds slightly less cuddly.”
“It’s like spontaneous combustion, right? Spontaneous vowel centralization.”
“I don’t think out loud. I have to think in my head and then I say it.”
“It’s like having two different sets of magnetic poetry on your fridge.” -on code switching.
“Have you had your archiphonemes today?”
“Finnish speaker here meets Swedish speaker there and says ‘Oh! We’re lacking a definite article! Can I borrow one?” -on the implausibility of borrowing grammatical morphemes
“We have snicken into the room.”
“Friends are more expensive now.”
“Inflation.”
“That’s one thing about linguistics. It will ruin you for life. You’ll never be able to talk again.”
“Probably often is used more … frequently.”
“Let’s get rid of our archiphonemes … our arch nemesis.”
“Everyone didn’t just wake up one morning and say ‘Oh! Our vowels have slipped.’”
“How embarrassing!”
[Really big word] (Pneumonomicroscopicsilicovolcanoconsis?)
“Yes! I know that word!”
"I was killed by punctuation."
"Did I just see a second Mugging? Oh, good."
"We're listening to vegetables talking."
"I can afford to be arrogant, because I'm so insecure."
"Let me help you from your misery, O honeycomb."
"You put one hand underneath your leg. That's your foot."
"Setting it in the real world just automatically makes it a 'Buffy' sort of situation."
"It was on Jeopardy once. Look it up."
"But we aren't going to put the Jeopardy one in, because people normally say things like that."
"I'm going to misquote myself aloud, so that way it'll be real."
"I normally wait at least a day before I laugh at myself."
"I can subtract 5 from 25 at least twice every day."
"Oh! Got him with the old 'Ha ha, you speak English' thing!"
"No! We will never have blue sheep!"
"I care about Highlander more than Jeff."
"If you need roots, plant a tree."
"Look, we thought of this clever comment, and hey, we can lie with it!"
"The falling and splattering is normal. We always did that."
"We got into groups of who we were with."
"'She didn't say it right, so we had to make her say it again so...' No, that's not right."
"Can you be depressed tomorrow? That's the next one."
"I'm gonna drown, just because I can't swim."
"Run, Ron, run! The toilet's leaving soon!"
"Okay, which yellow is the real yellow and which one is the pretend yellow?"
"Oh, how cute! It's an Eeyore decapitated!"
"Aah! The Corn Flakes deflected the milk."
"D in a ZC! That is driving me nuts!"
"Come on, smoking carcass, get up!"
"Orange? I've never seen that color before!"
"I can only build a fusion cannon?!"
"I am a foofy blue monster! Cause -- I'm blue now!"
"But my heart reason is that he uses similes like 'bumblebees.'"
"I wish I weren't unique like everyone else. Then I'd be different than them."
"College students don't look young to me yet -- (gasp) oh, wait, they do!"
"I didn't know what slumber was! I figured it was probably kind of orangeish, but I didn't know."
"Hey, Abby! Come back and be funny and evil again!"
"Don't worry, you don't need to put it in your quote book because you'll have me with you always."
"I have to tie my shoe, and it's all different."
"Oh good! 'You Don't Love Me Any More.'"
"It's a bloody pain not to reproduce!"
"I've seen mutant Kristins in my day, who have two I's."
"Chew me to bits! But not the cards, please."
by Leeana Tankersley
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