I identify more than I suspect one should with Lieutenant Bush.
"Wholesalers, he notes, transport prostitutes as if they were grain or wine, while retailers acquire them as if they were bread or sauce."
-The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World
(by Thomas McGinn, here loosely quoting Clement of Alexandria)
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Got a two-fer for you here:
"I know and I have much to tell you."
-- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Doom of the Dragon
and...
"And -in can also function as an intensifier, as in cases such as inflammable, which can mean "not capable of being set on fire" and also "very much capable of being set on fire".
--Bad English, Ammon Shea
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Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance.
--H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness," At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
The Levellers had already wielded this doctrine of revolutionary democracy, not only against the Monarchy and the Established Church, but also against the conservative Presbyterian Long Parliament and Cromwell's military dictatorship.
--George Novack, Empiricism and Its Evolution--A Marxist View
Mirabeau indeed said that the colonists slept on the edge of Vesuvius, but for centuries the same thing had been said and the slaves had never done anything.
--C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
I also liked this sentence, from page 78"
The rich are only defeated when they are running for their lives.
Definitely not the 5th sentence on page 55, but it showed up on my screen and I have to share it somewhere:
She had a poise that said she had killed before. No problem, thought Locke as he moved backwards, so have I, and that's when he tripped over the body of the man he just stabbed.
Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies
"The mind is a gourmet; let us furnish it with savory and delicate dishes, suited to its taste; it will eat all the more for sensuality's having whetted the appetite."
--Hippolyte Taine, as quoted in Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History
He [Gilgamesh] returns empty-handed to Erech, and here the epic probably ended.
--S.H. Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology
It happened to the post-ideological Jimmy Carter in his bid for reelection, it happened to the budget-balancing Walter Mondale; it happened to the technocratic centrist Michael Dukakis--each one of them magically transformed on the day of their defeat into an instructional film on why Democrats needed to embrace post-ideological, budget-balancing, technocratic centrism.
--Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal; Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
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Stupid Yrkoon; for all that he prided himself that he was a Melnibonéan, he lacked the Melnibonéan subtlety.
--Michael Moorcock, Elric of Melniboné
"The industry is down to its last few schools of octopi"
-- Lemony Snicket, "Who could that be at this hour?"
Each time a multiclass character achieves a new level, he either increases one of his current class levels by one or picks up a new class at 1st level.
-- Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition Core Rulebook
"Wheat had come to nearly monopolize the Midwest, but this crop was particularly vulnerable to the locusts."
-Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Fall of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. Jeffrey A Lockwood.
'Now I became zealous'
- The Secret Diary of Mata Hari by Anon
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A range of hills lay against the sky in the horizon, and soon the rows of palms which adorn Bombay came distinctly into view.
--Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
In terms of world history--in terms even of European exapansion as manifested down to the middle years of the nineteenth century--it was a situation that was entirely new, the product not of slow and continuous development, but of forces released suddenly and with revolutionary effects within the life span of one short generation.
--Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History
In the lead, Basset shifted aside to make way for a woman going the other way, leading a small boy-child by the hand, a market basket on her other hand.
--Margaret Frazer, A Play of Knaves
Proof that it was strong enough to carry armour was the Panzer IV squatting on the bridge like a giant, grey toad.
-- Jack Didden and Maarten Swarts, Kampfgruppe Walter and Panzerbrigade 107
Because what those Shanghai students, and other students and workers I spoke to, said to me was "We think that is possible."
--Stephen Jolly, "Eyewitness in China," republished in Tiananmen 1989--Seven Weeks That Shook the World, a ChinaWorker.Info pamphlet
"There was something wrong about the air."
-- The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss
"You'll outnumber them at least three to one"
--Bodyguard of Lightning, Stan Nicholls
This form of heresy was joined in by the dream visions of the mystic sects, such as the Scourging Friars, the Lollards, etc., which in times of suppression continued revolutionary tradition.
--Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany
The SFs and the Lollards each get their own footnote, that between them take up two pages.
I've always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She'd been to college.
--Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
The Murmur of Erebus hovered on the edge of Alpharius's hearing as the primarch waited for the portal to open.
Deliverance Lost
Gav Thorpe
"Mmh"
--Blueberry: Collected Adventures 1
"Of those mourners who gathered at his internment in 1154, none had more to lament Roger's passing than one of his closest confidants, Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Idris Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi, more commonly known as Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi."
Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in 12 Maps
Boy, is that name a mouthful. Though I suspect there's some family tree stuff going on in there, too...
At first it was but a murmur, a rumble, but by the time he had finished speaking, while the assassins were untying my ankles in order to lead me to the scene of my murder, I heard, as plainly as ever I heard anything in my life, the clinking of horseshoes and the jingling of bridle chains, with the clank of sabres against stirrup-irons.
--Arthur Conan Doyle, "How the Brigadier Held the King", in The Complete Brigadier Gerard
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An army of nearly 200,000 Chinese laborers had been sent to Europe during the war.
--Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution
I am reading a copy online; had a xeroxed copy a couple decades ago but it's long gone. Went to Facebook to see if any of my commie friends could provide me with the fifth sentence, etc.
Paizonians trolled me.
Here is Comrade Samnell's offering:
"We were about fifty miles out from Shanghai when Mao dropped some bad acid and started ranting about how people could make steel in their back yards."
And another, from Kruelaid, I believe his Paizonian handle is:
"His followers prostrated themselves, gibbering among themselves and nodding."
They each received an invitation to the Fun-Timey Reeducation Through Labor Supercenter.
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He had heard men cry so when his salvation and his nemesis, his great black battle-blade Stormbringer, drank their souls.
--Michael Moorcock, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate
Moreover, since Russia was a multinational state, the social democrats also had to compete with left nationalist parties like the Ukrainian Radical Democratic Party and the Polish Socialist Party, and similar parties in the Baltic region and Transcaucasus.
--Joseph Seymour, Lenin and the Vanguard Party
"Why not?"
--Steven Brust, Jhereg
I thought I had already posted that, but I guess I didn't.
"The canal would be given over to 'international' control, and Israel would be confirmed in much of its territorial gain."
-- Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace
Definitely not the 5th sentence on page 55, but it showed up on my screen and I have to share it somewhere:
She had a poise that said she had killed before. No problem, thought Locke as he moved backwards, so have I, and that's when he tripped over the body of the man he just stabbed.Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies
Asked Mr. Comrade, who's reading this, if he had run across this sentence yet and he went on for about thirty minutes straight dropping spoilers.
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I'd have just asked if you were ready for the good shit and handed you the book(s).
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Mr. Comrade likes to talk about what he's reading. It usually works out pretty well. There's only so many books I can read in a lifetime, so sometimes I hand him stuff I don't think I will get to, and he gives me a full report. Other times, I wish he'd shut up.
But, yeah, I'm convinced that I have to read Lynch.
I am not. Most people don't read RPG books in multiple sittings. I may sit down with a book on occasion, but when I put it away I am no longer "reading" it. On the other hand, I have a stack of books by my bed that I am "reading". So the book I looked at last and plan to pick up next is the book I count as "reading" when one of these pops up. Which tends to either be a novel or a history book. Or philosophy.
When I acquire a new RPG book, I'll usually read it cover to cover (often with some jumping around, esp. if there are cross-references), but I'm also aware that I'm probably in a minority there. I also try to have at least one non-RPG book that I'm reading at the same time, so I don't burn out on game mechanics-laden prose.
At the moment, that's currently the new edition of Blue Rose, which is hefty but thankfully heavy on the fluff, too (thought this bit from page 55 is in the middle of a rules example): "While it's not enough to use the Resources at Hand exploration stunt, it is sufficient to use The Right Tools, which allows Pell to have or improvise appropriate tools for a task."
The non-RPG book I'm currently reading is Da Vinci for Dummies. From page 55: "In his notebooks, he expressed his dietary preferences, which included cereals, fruits, mushrooms, pasta, and minestrone."