“Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...”

December “HOUSE TO HOUSE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

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John Brunner147

British author 1934–1995

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“Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither a past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in a certain times.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Source: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter Two

“Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Alfred Marshall, p. 188

“But the room seemed so poor, pleading for warmth and joy. Vera Rivken's room. She had been nice to Arturo Bandini, and she was poor. I took the small roll from my pocket, peeled off two one dollar bills, and laid them on the table. Then I walked down the stairs, my lungs full of air, elated, my muscles so much stronger than ever before.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Contributions of Jane Wagner

“If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?”

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

Other material for Lily Tomlin

“Behind her chair, from a wall covered in a very expensive velvet-flock paper, a portrait of her grandfather looked down. He had been an Episcopalian bishop, but the picture showed him in the costume of a New England gentleman keeping up the Old English custom of riding to hounds: red coat, brown boots, distinguished with a white dog-collar and black silk front.
Hugh referred to him as being dressed to kill.
The salad was replaced—though Hugh had sampled only a mouthful of his—by a dish of cold fish with mayonnaise. He didn’t even touch this course. He was suddenly afraid of it because it had come from the sea.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

February “DISGRACE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

“On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels”

Helen Garner book Cosmo Cosmolino

Page 5.
Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)

“See what the world looks like from orbit. Well, in that way, at least, there was profit to be had. Nobody could look down at the planet, green and blue, with no borders in evidence and no sign of human habitation, and not get his perspective forever altered.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 16 (p. 142)

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Adapted from a passage in Schools of Hellas http://www.archive.org/stream/schoolsofhellasa008878mbp#page/n105/mode/2up, the posthumously published dissertation of Kenneth John Freeman (1907). The original passage was a paraphrase of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. See the Quote Investigator article http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-ancient-times/. <br class="br">see Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service, Edited by Suzy Platt, 1989, number 195 http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html. Last line: "Evidently, the quotation is spurious." <br class="br">See also this Google Answers discussion http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104 about the topic. <br class="br">Somewhat similar sentiments are in ( lines 961–985 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0241:card%3D961) of Aristophanes' The Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates. However, the lines are delivered by the character "Right" or "Just Discourse", not Socrates. <br class="br">Misattributed

“Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!”

Terry Pratchett book Night Watch

Source: Night Watch

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John Brunner147

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