Satire Books

"What will happen to me? I mean, if they flood the town and I'm forced to leave, how am I supposed to move my mobile home?"

"I read the signs hanging in storefront windows hoping a tale of drama would emerge: Dam Being Torn Down Sale! declared the first. Everything Must Go Before the Dam is Torn Down and Town is Destroyed, trumpeted another. Preflood Sale, screamed a third. Then, like a golfer playing the back nine trying to finish before the heavy stuff comes down, I was struck by a lightning bolt. My God! That's it! That's my story... SMALL TOWNS ARE A BARGAIN HUNTER'S DREAM!"

"To compensate for their skittishness around one another, humans have developed an elaborate system of body language. Folded arms, for instance, may signal that the subject is closed off and wishes for the conversation to end, or that he is an Indian chief. Either way, avoid these people. A woman with her legs splayed wide may be saying "Welcome. How do you do?" or "I am adventurous and open to new ideas." Either way, seek these women out."

"People can't help what they don't know. "I can't help the starving people of India, because I don't know what they need."

"I had been on the road for what seemed like weeks but was probably closer to days, more specifically hours."

"Wigfield, said the sign. Wigfield's Hottest Ladies. I was intrigued. When was it incorporated? What was its population? And just how hot were these ladies?"

"Having never written a book before, I had no way to gauge the time it would take to complete a 50,000 word tome. And then the realisation hit me: I could be at this for days!"

"Dedication: As this book, including this dedication, was written in chronological order, I have, so far only myself to thank. This is assuming I will continue to be involved."

"I worked for the Federal Department of Transportation, painting the center lines on interstates. It was rewarding work, with the added benefit of being unchallenging. But following a heated dispute with my foreman over the meaning of the word sick day, I quit my job shortly after he fired me. But freedom has its price, which I soon found out was money. So, much like a butcher naturally becomes a surgeon, or a boxer becomes a cop, I decided to apply my knowledge of drawing long, white lines on asphalt to drawing much shorter ones with loops and curls on paper. In short, words. I became a writer!"

"Words cannot describe all the things that I have left to write."

"My book would be written from the heart, probably my own. I would talk about how the death of Small-Town America brings great pain to me because I had always had an appreciation for these tiny villages. For who doesn't feel a fondness for a place where you know all your neighbors, and you can keep your doors unlocked, or you could enter your neighbors' home at night because you know his doors are unlocked?"

"I have a simple philosophy: KOKO! Which stands for Keep On Keepin' On. You know? Keep on living, even if it kills you."

"What I learned made me angry. What I read made me sleepy."

"Sometimes this place is like Old Salem, hunting for witches because of ignorance. If only they'd reach out and try to understand what we're about, we wouldn't feel compelled to place curses on them."

"The philosophies behind witch and a wiccan are totally different. A wiccan wears ceremonial black robes and invites her body to be inhabited by an evil spirit that commands her to perform tasks of mayhem and destruction. A witch, on the other hand, can wear anything she wants."

"I love Wigfield. It reminds me of the quaint little town in Pakistan called Gujurat, where I spent much of my early career. Like Wigfield, they understood the value of human life. So very few people are willing to put a price on it."

"I remember not far back, I got some dogs to take care of and some chickens to take care of and the dogs killed my chickens, so I got rid of the dogs and got some more chickens, and wouldn't you know it? I killed the chickens. I guess I judged those dogs pretty harshly."

"Most people think witches are a coven of lesbians dancing naked in the forest celebrating the semen stolen from imprisoned hypnotized males, which they then use to inseminate one another using turkey basters in order to create a legion of demon babies. Well, that's only part of it. We are also active in community outreach programs."

"My plan was simple. Stay calm and stay in control of what was becoming an increasingly dangerous situation. In order to implement my plan, I launched into phase one: begging for my life."

"And Wigfield is small. It's so small that we have to go to the post office for a haircut, and they always lose it."

"As I held The History of Wigfield in my hands, fiddling with its well-worn cover, I anticipated the wealth of information it must contain. I excitedly cracked open the cover and the words seemed to leap right off the page and land directly in my book in identical sequence!"

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's you can't un-fry things."

"As I'm sure you can tell by my body adornment, I am an Artist of Doom. Cast your gaze into my bicep if you dare, there you will find a tattoo of chaos and destruction. Go ahead, if you wish to stare into the lair of oblivion. But beware: Once ensnared, there is no escape from my upper arm."

"I could easily describe Wigfield in three words, but I don't know what they would be."

"You don't own me motherfucker."

"I searched frantically for someone, anyone who could translate it for me, but everywhere I looked were just mirrors in which my own hideous laughing face was reflected. I cried, "How will I ever finish this book?" And then I knew the terrifying answer. I would have to write it."

"We have a strong sense of tradition here in Wigfield. We're one of the only towns that still celebrates V-J Day. For you young 'uns, that stands for victory over the Japanese! It's a joyous celebration. It's a time when the town comes together and remembers how many gave away their lives to nobly advance the cause of liberty, but mostly it's a good way to get together to remember how much we hate the Japanese. We hate Koreans, too!"

"More than ever the theater is the lifeblood of a community, but it's more than that. It's all the fluids, blood, semen, urine, and saliva. If I don't leave that combination of liquids onstage after a performance, then I know I have dropped the ball and let my audience down."

"[Rabbits] are industrious, they are dedicated, and they are delicious!"

"It's a funny thing about Shell Knob state confineatentuary, when you look out into the yard, you see so many of the ladies from Wigfield, you would swear you were at one of the town picnics! I suppose the only difference is, in Wigfield, we don't have armed guards on top of our electrified fences..."

"One of the things I do [at the morgue] is to make sure all the bodies that come in are dead. Here's my test: I just do things to them that no living human would allow, and if they don't react, then I know they're dead. And if they do react, well, the severity of the test usually makes that moot."

"Two things became clear after speaking to Lenare Degroat: One, steer clear of Lenare Degroat."

"I've spent every one of my forty-eight years right here in Wigfield, except for the times I've been incarcerated or living elsewhere."

"My brain had shut down and the only way to revitalize it was to get some serious R&R, and by R&R I meant, of course, T&A."

"If you get burned by your stove, don't keep touching it, get rid of it!"

"Most animals are just waiting for their chance to take a swipe at a human. It's in their nature. They're animals. That's why we call them that. They don't have souls. They don't have nothing to fear in the afterlife. They have nothing to lose!"

"A hummingbird would gladly peck your eyes out. It would amuse it. It would hover above your eye socket sucking out your eye juice like nectar and throw it back up to its waiting hungry children! I'm not making this stuff up, I'm imagining it."

"I don't ask them questions and they don't ask me things like "What college did you go to?" ir "Why don't you display your license on the side of the van?" or "Are these tools clean?""

"And another thing: Naturalistic poses. Frolicking in some moss. Holding a nut. What's the point of that? If you wanted this squirrel to hold a nut, then why did you lock yourself in mortal combat with it? That's why I like to capture the last moment before the animal gives up the ghost. You can almost feel the fear rising off it like a stink. I don't coddle my dead animals."

"When I first heard about the dam being torn down I was on a three-day X freak-out, so I was mostly just amused. Three days later I was pretty tired and after that I was unconscious, but now I'm just taking it one day at a time, you know, just trying to figure out what I was saying. What was the question?"

"But my policy is never to turn a customer away. Some doctors might tell their client, "What you're asking me to do might be dangerous to your health," or "If this leaks inside your breast it's going to cause major problems," but I don't say those things. I'm not here to judge."

"I'm the great American success story. One day you're livin' out of your car, the next day you're livin' out of your car, and you're the mayor of a town. I practically run this place, and I'm not even fully unpacked."

"Now, a lot of people ask me how I acquired so many abandoned cars in such a small community. Well, the answer is simple. It's none of their goddamn business. And I resent the implication that I am murdering people for their cars, if that is indeed what they are implying, which would make perfect sense because, let's face it, how am I getting all these cars? I just want this community to rest assured that there are probably plenty of ways to get around killing people for their cars."

"Surrounding all this was a high barbed-wire fence, inside of which stood a cadre of snarling canines. But following the old adage that a snarling dog never bites, I scaled the fence, dropped to the ground, and enjoyed a brief mauling. I quickly occupied the dog's snapping jaws with my limbs to buy some time until I could figure out what to do with all this pain."

"I came to this town to represent the lead dispersal plant. The government wanted to close it because they said it was retarding the employees. So they closed it. I got a court order that allowed me to stay at the plant so I could disprove firsthand the effects of the plant. I like watches; they're shiny."

"It turns out it's pretty hard to exercise your right to vote when you're on fire."

"Top of my list is to find out who's killing all these people. I have already narrowed down the list of Mr. or Mrs. Murderer or Murderers. The second thing we need to do is establish a profile of the perp. Now, my investigation has show that the victims were killed by a blunt trauma to the back of the head or stabbing or shooting or poisoning or burning or... did I say shooting? This is often followed by dismemberment. Or preceded. It's really hard to tell after a while. But clearly this is a person who is a local and familiar to everyone or a stranger just passing through whose movements remain a mystery."

"Sorry about the dogs. My dad says they only attack in the presence of people."

"I like being a lawyer. It makes me proud. I have a briefcase. I keep my fudge in there."

"I keep a diary. I been keepin' a diary since I was fourteen years old. Writing in a diary is like a muscle, you have to do it every day or you could easily pull it. Even if I don't have anything to say, I write: "Dear diary, I don't have anything to say today, maybe tomorrow." Sometimes I get tired of writing the same thing, so instead I might write, "Dear diary, nothing coming today, I'll see you tomorrow.""