life is neongrün

"Want something to eat, Nerburn?"
"What do you have?" I asked.
"Fry bread."
Icould see the golden balls leaning against each other like puckered doughnuts on a piece of newspaper next to the stove.
"Absolutely," I said. The doughy lard pastry had to be one of the wolrd's least healthy foods, but it was a staple of most Indian diets, and it tasted wonderful.
She handed me a piece of fresh fry bread wrapped in a napkin, then two more to pass to Jumbo. The grease leached through and covered my fingers.
"Better look inside, Nerburn," Grover said fro his seat across the room. "Reservation fortune cookie. Might have a food stampof inside it."
The others roared with laugther. It was inside humor and far from politically correct. But iwas a sign that I was no longer an outsider. They were willing to make fun of themselves in my present and their barbs were directed at each otehr, not at me. I pulled open the fry bread and gave a shrug.
"Just not a lucky guy," Grover said.


I was doing my best to wash the shampoo out of the cuts on my arm to stop the burning.
"You can use my knife if you want, Nerburn," Grover said. "Just tie off, take a shot of whiskey, and get rid of that arm. Just like the old days."
"Well, I don't have any whiskey," I said. "And thiis one of my two favorite arms. I think i'm going to save it."
"Suit yourself."


Dan: "Let's go around back, find a better place to sit. It's better than going back in that motel room. A guy should always try to have a sky over his head. Besides, it increases my odds."
The reference eluded me. "For what?" I asked.
He jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow. "That I won't die looking up at a lightbulb."


I shook my head with amazement. We had driven for a day and a half and where within a few miles of a place that had haunted his dreams for almost eighty years, and now we had to stop for lunch.
"Find a place with French fries," he said. "I like French fires. You can count them."
"Well, I guess that's important."
"It is. I like to eat twenty-eight."
[....]
"You got French fries?" Dan asked.
"Yes, sir," the man answered.
"I'd like twenty-eight," Dan said.
"Twenty-eight it is," the man said, as if it were an evereyday request.
[...]
Finally, with his food in the proper order, he picked up one of the French fires, broke it in half, and rubbed the two pieces together.
"Giving thanks?" I said.
He looked at me like I was the dumbest person in the world.
"No. Getting the salt off. Doctor said it ain't good for me."
"You could have just asked the guy to hold the salt."
He had stuffed the first one in his mouth and was gumming it around. "Who ever heard of French fries without salt?"

--> the Wolf at Twilight

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Die Logik ist zwar unerschütterlich, aber einem Menschen der leben will, widersteht sie nicht.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
- first line of the book

The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which tuned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.
- Description of Mr. Darcy

Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.
- Jane Bennett

To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success; and happy did she think it for Bingley and her sister that some of the exhibition had escaped his notice, and that his feelings were not of a sort to be much distressed by the folly which he must have witnessed.
- LOL

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.
- Mr. Bennett to Elizabeth LOL

"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner"
- Elizabeth to Mr. Darcy

I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.
- Elizabeth

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
- Darcy to Elizabeth