Rupert Holmes Quotes

Ah well. In life, what’s important is to learn from your mistakes, to identify why others might have led you into making them, and to kill them.

The only law I'd ever knowingly broken was white wine with steak...

It was absolutely the worst way she could have phrased it, as if her voice had been hijacked by what Edgar Allan Poe called the Imp of the Perverse.

"Endiro Giansante, owner of Fawn Street Florists, descended from the store's attic where he was drying pink larkspur to find his new deliveryman, Ludis Lanka, standing near the register holding two ten-dollar bills upright in his hand.

"A man came in, you were upstairs, so I took the order," he beamed proudly.

"Ludis, you're a nice fellow but you're never to deal with a customer. Unless they're Latvian," he added with a smile, "in which case I'd ask you to translate."

By way of confession, Ludis added, "He gave me a two-dollar tip, and reached to his pocket as if he might have to split it with Endiro.

"No, keep the two dollars, but you're a delivery boy, not a salesman. Delivery man," he corrected himself, for Ludis was surely in his twenties or early thirties. He'd only been working there a few days, answering a sign in the window. God knows how the sweet fellow would survive on what he paid him, thought Endiro. He must surely live with relatives.

"Es biju citur," said Ludis, which means "I was elsewhere." Not quite apropos but it was the first Latvian phrase Cliff had learned at McMasters and he'd been told he'd pronounced it well.

I’m sorry,” she said for the first time in a decade. Another new skill mastered.

When a man dies from a bullet entering his chest, it’s a homicide. When a man dies from a meteorite landing on his head, it’s a tragedy. Don’t use bullets. Use meteorites. Don’t commit a homicide. Commit a tragedy. — Guy McMaster

it’s difficult to obtain a student loan for a school that not only denies its own existence but teaches its students how to deny other people theirs.

I hope you will come to better understand and appreciate the remarkable frailty of all life… and that you will learn to live each day as if it might be your enemy’s last.

My mum and dad taught me not to laugh at people who aren’t laughing,” she explained. “Besides, I think in life, the joke usually turns out to be on us.

what were my impressions upon viewing for the first time the manor where you’d had me brought? My initial thought was “Toad Hall.” This was, of course, an inadequate comparison but the best I could muster considering the limited number of books I’d read that centered on soaring Gothic structures. (As a boy, I went nine pages into The Hunchback of Notre Dame before realizing it wasn’t a football story.)

In the billions of years during which Life — an indispensable ingredient to Homicide — has been teeming on this earth, from that momentous primordial dawn when one bold amoeba set foot on land with the intent of becoming either a chicken or an egg, it was understandable that the strong would have dominion over the weak. But in recent millennia, flying in the face of Darwinian precepts, we have evolved into a planet where the un-fittest not only survive but often flourish, holding sway over their betters in a social order where dim-witted, dim-watted employers all too often lord it over their considerably brighter subjects. We at McMasters call this perversion of nature’s intent “the devaluation of the species,” and no modern pestilence is more pernicious in our overview than the Sadistic Boss. It is with pride that McMasters offers a powerful helping hand (or leg up) to those under the thumb (or heel) of such oppressors.

It is simplicity itself to fire one’s employer. All it takes is some kindling and a match.

"The same way death ought to come," added Dobson, almost wistfully. "No time for last words, apologies, retractions, rewrites. The good you did, the mess you made, that's what lives on."

So you’ve decided to commit a murder.
Congratulations. Simply by purchasing this volume, you’ve already taken the all-important first step toward a successful homicide of which you can be proud, one that would gain you the admiration of your peers, were they ever to learn of it.
This book will see to it that they don’t.

We’re not patients or soldiers!” I yelled. “We just work here. And when we took our jobs nobody said, ‘Incidentally, the real reason we’re hiring you is because we have this one executive whose ego takes priority over the well-being of everyone else.