“ First, a bath. I'm feeling soiled. Too much contact with cold reality, I think. ”
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, Wake up and write the book!
~ Kerry Greenwood
The Albion was a spacious pub, built in the days when a public house with any pretensions to gentility had to have fourteen foot ceilings, brass taps and a polished wooden bar you skate down. ... Bert, in his reflective moments, considered that if heaven didn't have a well-appointed pub where a man could sit down over a beer for a yarn with the other angels, then he didn't want to go there.
He could pass off the inferior bottles on tables seven and four. Table seven knew nothing of wine, sending back a bottle of Riesling as corked because it had bits of cork in it, the imbeciles. Table four had gulped down a very special old pale brandy as though it was common wood alcohol, which was probably what they had been drinking because they had said that his brandy lacked bite. They deserved inferior burgundy. The bottles that had been stored too close to the stove might have enough bite by now for table four. A wine waiter's revenge may be long in coming, but it arrives in the end.
Even the reeking dark in the lion's cage seemed precious and infinitely preferable to whatever lay beyond. She would go out like the flame of a candle. Where does the candle flame go when the candle is blown out?She laid her painted face against the iron bars and bared her teeth at death.
