Cemetery Caterer Quote of the Day (from A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle)

"Ravens bring things to people. We're like that; it's our nature. We don't like it; we'd much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we're ravens and there you are. Ravens don't feel right without somebody to bring things to.... We're closer to people than any other bird, and we're bound to them all our lives, but we don't have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard."

— from A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle

Western Quote of the Day (from Trailin'! by Max Brand)

Bard was turning the pages slowly. The title, whose meaning dawned slowly on his astonished mind as a sunset comes in winter over a grey landscape, was The Critique of Pure Reason. He turned the book over and over in his hands. It was well thumbed.

He asked, controlling his voice: "Are you fond of Kant?"

"Eh?" queried the other.

"Fond of this book?"

"Yep, that's one of my favorites. But I ain't much on any books."

"However," said Bard, "the story of this is interesting."

"It is. There's some great stuff in it," mumbled Lawlor, trying to squint at the title, which he had quite overlooked during the daze in which he first picked it up.

Bard laid the book aside and out of sight.

"And I like the characters, don't you? Some very close work done with them."

"Yep, there's a lot of narrow escapes."

"Exactly. I'm glad that we agree about books."

"So'm I. Feller can kill a lot of time chinning about books."

— from Trailin'! by Max Brand

Hard Case Crime Quote of the Day (from Zero Cool by John Lange)

"I want to know what he told you."

"He told me nothing."

"I don't believe that."

"It's the truth."

"Perhaps. There are way of telling. As you may know, the castle is equipped with an exemplary dungeon. All the finest equipment from the fifteenth century. It was the time of the Inquisition, and the inventiveness was remarkable."

— from Zero Cool by John Lange (reprinted by Hard Case Crime)

Hard Case Crime Quote of the Day (from Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake)

"The girl I went with last year ... kept wanting me to put money in the stock market.... I’d tell her I’d rather play the races than the market because I knew the races and I didn’t know the market, and she’d get mad and start claiming that horse-racing and the stock market weren’t the same thing, and I’d say of course they were and give her analogies, and she’d get madder and insist the analogies were false, and so it went until finally we gave the whole thing up and she went her way and I went mine."

— from Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake (reprinted by Hard Case Crime)

Classic Wodehousean Comic Novel Quote of the Day (from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome)

We are very fond of pineapple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry—but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.

— from Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome (audiobook read by Martin Jarvis)

Classic Private Eye Novel Quote of the Day (from My Gun Is Quick by Mickey Spillane)

"When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else's experiences. Fun, isn't it? You read about life on the outside thinking about how maybe you'd like it to happen to you, or at least how you'd like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it's great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it's all in books and not in reality at all and that's that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you'll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination. But remember this: there are things happening out there.... All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn't if I were you because you won't like what you'll find.... They aren't nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn't a Coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and ... if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you'll be dead."

— from My Gun Is Quick by Mickey Spillane

Hard Case Crime Quote of the Day (from Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block)

"They say every man has a weakness. They say that for every man there's a woman somewhere in the world who can make him jump through fiery hoops just by snapping her fingers. They say a man's lucky if he never meets that woman."

— from Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block
(reprinted by Hard Case Crime)

Western/Crime Novel Quote of the Day (from Black Hats by Patrick Culhane/Max Allan Collins)

"You're reading a book," [Kate Elder] said as [Wyatt Earp] set the thick little red-bound volume on the porch railing.

"You needn't sound so surprised."

"What is it?"

"Hamlet. Friend of mine suggested it."

This seemed to amuse her. "What do you think of it?"

"This Hamlet feller is a talkative man. Wouldn't have lasted long in Kansas."

— from Black Hats by Patrick Culhane (pseudonym of Max Allan Collins)

Pulp Western Quote of the Day (from Black Jack by Max Brand)

"I'll tell you, McGuire," he said gently. "Your great mistake is in talking too much. You've had a good deal of success, my friend. So much that your head is turned. You're quite confident that no one will invade your special territory; and ... you pity the sheriffs around you. Now listen to me. You've branded me as a criminal in advance. And I'm not going to disappoint you.... I'm going to make the sheriffs pity you, McGuire. I'm going to make your life a small bit of hell."

— from Black Jack by Max Brand

Pulp Novel Quote of the Day (from The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers)

The thing that I have to consider now without delay — the thing that I have to consider most intensely, and with all my mind, and now (now, sitting here at the desk in MacComerou's dusty, old-fashioned country living room, with St. Erme's young bride asleep on the horsehair sofa beside me, and the hot moonless night still black out-of-doors, though the dawn must break eventually — now, with the lanterns and flashlights moving out in the darkness, and the voices of the troopers and posse men near and far off, calling to each other with the thin, empty sound which men's voices have in the night; and some of them dropping back a while ago to get hot coffee from the pot left brewing on the kitchen range, with their grim tired faces swollen from mosquito bites and their legs covered to the knees with swamp muck and damp sawdust from the old sawmill pit, glancing in at me and the sleeping girl through the kitchen doorway only briefly while they gulped their drink in deep draughts to keep their brains awake, shaking their heads, in answer to my silent question, to indicate they had found no trace yet, and then out again on farther trails, with an empty slam of the screen door behind them — and now with the lanterns moving farther off through the woods and swamps, over the hills and down into the hollows; and now the distant baying of the hounds that have been brought in from somewhere; and armed men in pairs and squads patrolling every road for miles around, ready to shoot down at the rustle of a leaf that crazy killer, with his bloody saw-tooth knife and fanged grin, creeping so cunningly and red-handedly through the dark) — the thing that I have to consider here and without delay, in this deep darkness near the end of night, is this thing, and this thing only:

Where is that killer now?

— from The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers

(In case you didn't notice, that's all one sentence, even with the paragraph break.)

Comic Spy Novel Quote of the Day (from Money for Nothing by Donald E. Westlake)

"Her face now was a study in complexity, or abstraction, or something. Like a person eating a Fig Newton for the first time...."

— from Money for Nothing by Donald E. Westlake

Crime Novel Quote of the Day (from Die a Little by Megan Abbott)

"[Lois] is the kind of woman whose face you try to commit to memory because you feel something might happen to her any minute and you'll have to remember that left dimple, the burn mark from a curling iron on her temple, the beauty mark next to her eye, the small tear in her earlobe, from an earring tugged too far."

— from Die a Little by Megan Abbott