Fictional Characters

"I repeat, there are times when love takes over. (Santa Claus, where is yours? But I suppose you can't drink through that mask.) There are times when all the little demons disappear down their ratholes, and ugliness itself takes on the shape of beauty; when the darkest corner is touched by light; when the coldest heart feels the glow of warmth; when the trumpet call of good will and good cheer drowns out all the Babel of mean little noises. This is such a time. Merry Christmas! Merry merry merry!"

"The point was this, that he had shown what he really thought of me. He had shown that rather than lose me he would do something that he wouldn't have done for any fee anybody could name."

"For what you pay me I do your mail, I make myself obnoxious to people, I tail them when necessary, I shoot when I have to and get shot at, I stick around and take every mood you've got, I give you and Theodore a hand in the plant room when required, I lie to Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Stebbins whether required or not, I even help Fritz in the kitchen in emergencies, I answer the phone."

"I was born in Montenegro and spent my early boyhood there. At the age of sixteen I decided to move around, and in fourteen years I became acquainted with most of Europe, a little of Africa, and much of Asia, in a variety of roles and activities. Coming to this country in nineteen-thirty, not penniless, I bought this house and entered into practice as a private detective. I am a naturalized American citizen."

"Born in Ohio. Public high school, pretty good at geometry and football, graduated with honor but no honors. Went to college two weeks, decided it was childish, came to New York and got a job guarding a pier, shot and killed two men and was fired, was recommended to Nero Wolfe for a chore he wanted done, did it, was offered a full-time job by Mr. Wolfe, took it, still have it."

"Don't raise one brow like that. You know it disconcerts me."

"I had first noticed her in the lobby of the Churchill, because she rated a glance as a matter of principle — the principle that a man owes it to his eyes to let them rest on attractive objects when there are any around."

"He picked up the top item from the little pile of mail, an airmail letter from an orchid hunter in Venezuela, and started to read it. I swung my chair around and started sharpening pencils that didn't need it. The noise of the sharpener gets on his nerves. I was on the fourth pencil when his voice came."

"Wolfe was standing over by the big globe, probably picking out a spot for me to be exiled to."

"The subconscious is not a grave; it's a cistern."

"When will a policeman come?" "It will probably be Cramer in person. You know how he'll react when he learns she was here. Say two hours, possibly sooner." "Will she report what she told me?" "No." A corner of his mouth twitched. "That's why I put up with you; you could have answered with fifty words and you did it in one." "I've often wondered. Now tell me why I put up with you." "That's beyond conjecture. ..."

"Of the ten thousand women I have fallen in love with, every single one of them knew it before I did."

"...I suppose a DA has as much right to be a damfool as the people who voted for him."

"Wolfe's bellow would stop a tiger ready to spring."

"Wolfe's line was that a man who had been born in Greece, even though he had left at the age of six, should be familiar with the ancient glories of his native land, and he had been hammering away at Pete for forty months. That morning, as Wolfe swiveled his oversized chair, in which he was seated behind his desk, and Pete knelt and got his box in place, and I crossed to my desk, Wolfe demanded: "Who was Eratosthenes and who accused him of murder in a great and famous speech in four-oh-three B.C.?""

"A man with an alibi is suspect ipso facto."

"Innocence has no contract with bliss."

"Saul smiled. His smile is as tender as he is tough, and it helps to make him the best poker player I know."

"Well. When cheek meets cheek. You are manifestly indomitable and I must buckle my breastplate."

"I dived for the connecting door and went with it as I swung it open, and kept going, but two paces short of Wolfe's desk I halted to take in a sight I had never seen before and never expect to see again: Nero Wolfe with his arms tight around a beautiful young woman in his lap, pinning her arms, hugging her close to him. I stood paralyzed."

"When I mentioned the title of the privately printed book [The Music of the Future] he made a noise — he says all music is a vestige of barbarism ..."

"The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach."

"The doorbell rang, and I went, again giving myself even money that it was Vance, and losing again. It was a girl, or woman, and she had a kind of eyes that I had met only twice before, once a woman and once a man. I have a habit, when it's a stranger on the stoop, of taking a five-second look through the one-way glass and tagging him or her, to see how close I can come. From inside, the view through the glass is practically clear, but from outside it might as well be wood. But she could see through. Of course she couldn't, but she was face-to-face with me, and her eyes, slanted up, had exactly the look they would have if she were seeing me. They were nice enough hazel eyes, but I hadn't liked it the other two times it had happened, and I didn't like it then. Not trying to tag her, I opened the door. (chapter 5)"

"... a woman in the process of getting a divorce is apt to be skittish. She either thinks she has been swindled or she feels like a used car."

"I turned to Wolfe. "Your Honor, I object to the question on the ground that it is insulting, impertinent, and disgusticulous.""

"No. Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef's ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water."

"... the weapon was a piece of two-inch galvanized iron pipe sixteen and five-eighths inches long, threaded male at one end and female at the other, old and battered. Easy to hide under a coat. Where it came from might be discovered by one man in ten hours, or by a thousand men in ten years."

""By God. Talk about stubborn egos." Cramer shook his head. "That break you got on the carton. You know, any normal man, if he got break like that, coming down just in the nick of time, what any normal man would do, he would go down on his knees and thank God. Do you know what you'll do? You'll thank you. I admit it would be a job for you to get down on your knees, but—" (chapter 6)"

"And I am also not surprised that my employer, Mr. Nero Wolfe, approves of its publication because he has a great belief in the influence of printed words in books.But I have not a great hope that many people will eat superior meals because they buy this book and use it. On that I could say much but I will not write much and I will give only one case. There are a man and woman, married, at whose home I eat sometimes. They own fourteen cookbooks, good ones which they have asked me to suggest, and they have many times asked me for information and advice about cooking which I have been happy to give, but the dishes they serve are only fit to eat. They are not fit to remember after I come away. Those people should not try to roast a duck, and especially they should never try to make Sauce Saint Florentin.The facts about food and cooking can be learned and understood by anyone with good sense, but if the feeling of the art of cooking is not in your blood and bones the most you can expect is that what you put on your table will be mangeable. If it is sometimes mémorable that will be only good luck. Mr. Wolfe says that the secrets of the art of great cooking, like those of any art, are not in the brain. He says that no one knows where they are."

"In every part of the globe it is the same! Hatred, fear and unreasoning hostility have possessed men's hearts! But the Silver Surfer will have no part of it!"

"Perhaps the purest expression of heroism in the face of adversity was Marvel's Silver Surfer. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965, the Silver Surfer received his own title when Marvel expanded its line in 1968. The notion of a shiny silver being from another planet flying through the cosmos on a surfboard sounds ridiculous, but, in fact, this was an unusually humorless series. ... No matter where he goes or what he does to aid human civilization, he is repaid with fear and animosity. Yet, like a Christ figure sent to save the people of Earth, the Surfer bears his cross and endures his lonely obligation."

"We also tried the Silver Surfer for the Dark Side of the Moon. I wanted to use the Silver Surfer because we liked him. I wanted to use him, literally, on one of those huge great rollers in Hawaii, a guy sprayed or body clad in silver. I thought it would be really cool; it would look like a comic character come to life..."

"Stranger in a Strange Land is obviously a touchstone. Can you grok that? Stan Lee is doing his delightfully purple prose thing with "O'er" and "Seeker of truth." The setup in the Fantastic Four comic said that the Surfer was confined to roam the Earth, yearning for the freedom of celestial space and learning what it is to be human. It's a good setup, but it's not set in stone. Why NOT let him roam the universe. Why restrict him? It took until 1987 for that to happen with Marshall Rogers and Steve Engelhart's Silver Surfer relaunch. That was Engelhart's stated purpose, to get the Surfer into space where he belongs."

"Silver Surfer #1 is a comic worth examining closely. It has a lot of things colliding at once. It's the straw that broke the camel's back in Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's working relationship. The Silver Surfer series is possibly John Buscema's finest moment. It's Stan Lee's first big self-conscious stab at creating something ambitious and meaningful. It's also a good example of what Lee's writing is like when you subtract Kirby or Steve Ditko from the equation. There are some interesting narrative flourishes, but also a leaden storytelling instinct and deep misunderstanding of his own co-creations."

"That wasn't the title track of the album for quite a while. It was going to be called The Lord of Karma. It wasn't until we finished that track and added the jet noises that we realized that "Surfing" was the song that summed up the feeling of the whole album. The whole thing with putting the Silver Surfer on the cover was purely by accident. It came about because the product manager at the record label, Jim Kozlowski, used to be called the Silver Surfer when he was a DJ in Boston. When I delivered the album, he said, "This is a great title. We should put the Silver Surfer on the cover." I had no idea what he was talking about. I literally did not know anything about the comic book character."

"We were all into Marvel Comics, and the Silver Surfer seemed to be another fantastic singular image. We never got permission to use it. But we liked the image of a silver man, on a silver surfboard, scooting across the universe. It had mystical, mythical properties.... Very cosmic man."

"Herald, prepare yourself!! Prepare to be ... REBORN! At the command of Galactus... you have fallen!! And now... at my command once again... I bid you... RISE!!"

"I won't let them take another Silver Surfer away from me."

"My conception of the Silver Surfer was a human being from space in that particular form. He came in when everybody began surfing — I read about it in the paper. The kids in California were beginning to surf. I couldn’t do an ordinary teenager surfing so I drew a surfboard with a man from outer space on it."

"I will no longer serve. This is the end for us both."

"Treasure every moment you have with her. Tell her she was right. There is always a choice."

"I am not the destroyer."

"All that you know is at an end."

"Drink deep, aged one. For even you must have a limit to the power cosmic you can absorb"

"The Silver Surfer stands with humankind this day!"

"What have my actions brought...?"

"If sacred places are spared the ravages of war... then make all places sacred. And if the holy people are to be kept harmless from war... then make all peoples holy."

"All over the Universe! I can feel them! They're all dying! Billions upon billions of souls are blinking out of existence! ... Not one knew what struck them! Horrible! I could taste their dread and confusion!"

"Thanos is like no foe I have ever faced. Perhaps he operates on unheard of spectro levels. There it is!! Amazing. The technologies involved at operating at this level would tax even Galactus's scientific abilities. Yet Thanos roams here freely."

"Completely mad. But perhaps he did have a point. Sure, at the top of his head. Was that a joke?"