Changing ​Places (Campus-trilógia 1.) 5 csillagozás

Tell me more about the twins. Or, better, ask them to write a line to their old Dad, if the Euphoric public school system is still teaching such outdated skills as writing. But that is great about the gardening. O'Shea is what you might call an avant-gardener.

127-128. oldal

The Rummidge faculty liked to complain about timetable clashes, but the real prolem was their reluctance to teach before ten o'clock in the morning or after four in the afternoon or in the lunch period or on Wednesday afternoons or any time at weekends.

210-211. oldal

'I'm fat and forty.'
'Nothing wrong with that. So am I.'

230. oldal

Do your still want me to send on Let's Write a Novel? What a funny little book it is. There's a whole chapter on how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody's done that since the eighteenth century?

130. oldal

Euphoric Times had recently reported an experiment in which rats fed on cornflake packets had proved healthier than rats fed on the cornflakes.

172. oldal

All my friends must have known – they must have seen the knife sticking out between my shoulder-blades – but no one sonofabitch had the decency to tell me. Afraid I'd bite their fucking heads off, I suppose, and so I would have done, but what are friends for anyway?

127. oldal

He found Let's Write a Novel five minutes later. […] It had been published in 1927, as a part of a series that included Let's Weave a Rug, Let's Go Fishing and Let's Have Fun With Photography. ' Every novel must tell a story,' it began. 'Oh, dear, yes,' Morris commented sardonically.

And there are three types of story, the story that ends happily, the story that ends unhappily, and the story that ends neither happily nor unhappily, or, in other words, doesn't end at all.

Aristotle lives! Morris was intrigued in spite of himself. He turned back to the title page to check out the author. 'A.J. Beamish, author of A Fair, But Frozen Maid, Wild Mystery, Glynis of the Glen, etc., etc.' He read on:

The best kind of story is the one with a happy ending; the next best one is the one with an unhappy ending, and the worst kind is the story that has no ending at all. The novice is advised to begin with the first kind of story. Indeed, unless you have Genius, you should never attempt any other kind.

'You've got something there, Beamish,' Morris murmured. Maybe such straight talking wouldn't hurt the students in English 305 after all, lazy pretentious bastards, most of them, who thought they could write the Great American Novel just typing out their confessions and changing the names.

87-8. oldal (Penguin 2002)

[about a strip dancer] As she scuffed past in boots like Mrs Swallow's, wearing a headscarf and carrying a little plastic zipper-bag, she looked as sexy as Siberian Miss Five Year Plan.

114. oldal (Penguin 2002)

In Morris Zapp's view, the root of all critical error was a naïve confusion of literature with life. Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was an open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of thing, literature of words.

47. oldal

I thought to myself, here I am, slaving away, running a house and family single-handed for the sake of my husband's career and my children's education, and I'm not even warm while doing it. If he can't wait for sex till he gets home, why should I wait for central heating? I suppose a more sensual woman would have taken a lover in revenge.

150. oldal (Penguin 2002)