Pretty Blatant Plagiarism (Act III)
Quick quotes!
It was one of those summer storms that seemed days in the making. Thick, sticky heat all week. A promise of rain that never came. Afternoon skies so grey they were almost purple.
I was eating yo-chi in Camperdown Park with my friends when the lightning started, frantic forking cracks to the west and the north. There was wind but no thunder and no rain. We stayed put.
There are certain unspoken social cues we give our friends to indicate the evening is over and we’d like to go home now. Such as asking what everyone’s up to this week. Offering another round of teas and coffees. Once, at a house party, I saw a host come downstairs in her pyjamas and not try very hard to maintain conversation through her retainer.
On the night of the storm, the immediate need to stop eating yo-chi and go our separate ways occurred to everyone all at once. The wind died. The first few drops of rain were like rubber bullets, and made two distinct noises when they hit the earth. Lightning was now pretty much non-stop in every direction, and though there wasn’t any thunder, there was a sort of hair-raising static electricity quivering the particles in the air. There was also a smell of impending doom. The smell of a rapidly emerging Act of God. Hard to describe in english words, but I promise that you’d know it if you smelt it.
As we moved with haste to our respective cars and houses someone pulled up the BOM website. Never in my life have I seen such a thick, angry band of red on the Sydney (Terry Hills) 128 km Radar Loop, running totally parallel to the coastline, burning its way east across the city. Trouble. I had about a kilometre to cover down King Street, mostly sheltered by shop awnings, so I legged it.
The first few hundred metres were kind of dreamlike. I could see the storm lashing people on the other side of the street, yanking trees up by their hair, flash flooding onto the footpath, etc. But none of that was happening to me. I felt my decision to make a run for it was proving to be a very smart one.
I suspect Icarus thought something similar on his first few flaps towards the sun.
When I crossed the road at Alice Street, properly exposed to the elements for the first time, I had the uneasy feeling that the heavy sheets of rain were coming from somewhere beneath me. Such was their whip. The rainwater was ankle deep across the road. Winds now psychotic and gale force. It was like running through an hyperactive, homicidal car wash. And as I stood shell shocked on the other side of the road, wetter than I have ever in my life been outside of a body of water, I heard a voice behind me say, ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’
The voice had come from one half of a couple that had made the crossing behind me, and who were now wringing their t-shirts and smiling at each other.
‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ the other said.
The idea of using famous quotes about adversity to somehow endure real world adversity struck me as both delusional and very righteous—though I do wonder how a non-lethal iron deficiency might make a person stronger?
This incident reminded me of a little trick I like to do on All My Eggs from time to time, which is to reappropriate nice turns of phrase that I have written down on my mousepad. Saves me the trouble of coming up with a story. Saves you the hassle of reading. And may also be helpful for both of us, should we ever have to face real adversity in our own lives (unlikely!).
Regular stories to pick back up in March. And as always, feel free to reply with any nice quotes you have enjoyed recently also. Enjoy.
For the next storm you get caught in:
Mrs Bingley Crocker, busy across the table reading her mail, the rays did not touch. Had they done so she would have called for Bayliss, the butler, to come and lower the shades, for she endured liberties neither from man nor from nature.
— P.G. Wodehouse, ‘Piccadilly Jim’
For ten year high school reunions you may or may not be attending in 2025:
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”
— Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’
For when you’ve been thinking too hard about how your job is mainly sending emails about other people’s emails:
“There’s only one sure means in life,” Deasy said, “Of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is to always ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”
— Michael Chabon, ‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’
For when you can smell a rapidly emerging Act of God:
She likes to meet disasters halfway, to get them over with.
— Margaret Drabble, ‘The Witch of Exmoor’
For when someone offers you feedback you don’t remember asking for:
‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’
‘Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean,’ said Samad, tersely, ‘that it is a good idea.’
— Zadie Smith, ‘White Teeth’
For when you sublux your rib opening yogurt (for random example):
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And all this is very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, a backbone.
— Terry Pratchett, ‘Reaper Man’
For when you’re sick of the party and you are psyching yourself up to leave:
I wanted to go home, which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn’t any food left on the planet, you’d still keep feeling hungry too.
— Barbara Kingsolver, ‘Demon Copperhead’
For handling mundanities with grace:
She had what the French call je ne sais quoi. Even when she was clipping her toenails she looked like she was eating a peach.
— Paul Murray, ‘The Bee Sting’
For the power of positive thought:
Like, thank you brain, whatever you are. A weird strange little room in his head where things happen secretly: which in fact seems so impressive it crosses over into being alarming.
— Sally Rooney, ‘Intermezzo’
If you like this quote series format, you can read Act I and Act II whenever you like.
Thanks Gus
Entertaining and funny as always!