User Profile

‘I heard of a man once,’ he said, ‘that had himself let up into the sky in a balloon to make observations, a man of great personal charm but a divil for reading books. They played out the rope till he was disappeared completely from all appearances, telescopes or no telescopes, and then they played out another ten miles of rope to make sure of first-class observations. When the time-limit for the observations was over they pulled down the balloon again but lo and behold there was no man in the basket and his dead body was never found afterwards lying dead or alive in any parish ever afterwards.’ Here I heard myself give a hollow laugh, standing there with a high head and my two hands still on the wooden rail. ‘But they were clever enough to think of sending up the balloon again a fortnight later and when they brought it down the second time lo and behold the man was sitting in the basket without a feather out of him if any of my information can be believed at all.’

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 162 - 163)

The wisest course on this question is probably that taken by the little-known Swiss writer, Le Clerque. ‘This matter,’ he says, ‘is outside the true province of the conscientious commentator inasmuch as being unable to say aught that is charitable or useful, he must preserve silence.’

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 1,481)

When I looked carefully at the ceiling I saw that Mr Mathers’ house and every road and house I knew were marked there, and nets of lanes and neighbourhoods that I did not know also. It was a map of the parish, complete, reliable and astonishing. The Sergeant looked at me and smiled again. ‘You will agree,’ he said, ‘that it is a fascinating pancake and a conundrum of great incontinence, a phenomenon of the first rarity.’ ‘Did you make it yourself?’ ‘I did not and nobody else manufactured it either. It was always there and MacCruiskeen is certain that it was there even before that. The cracks are natural and so are small cracks.’

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 127)

Whatever about the soundness of de Selby’s theories, there is ample evidence that they were honestly held and that several attempts were made to put them into practice. During his stay in England, he happened at one time to be living in Bath and found it necessary to go from there to Folkestone on pressing business. His method of doing so was far from conventional. Instead of going to the railway station and inquiring about trains, he shut himself up in a room in his lodgings with a supply of picture postcards of the areas which would be traversed on such a journey, together with an elaborate arrangement of clocks and barometric instruments and a device for regulating the gaslight in conformity with the changing light of the outside day. What happened in the room or how precisely the clocks and other machines were manipulated will never be known. It seems that he emerged after a lapse of seven hours convinced that he was in Folkestone and possibly that he had evolved a formula for travellers which would be extremely distasteful to railway and shipping companies. There is no record of the extent of his disillusionment when he found himself still in the familiar surroundings of Bath but one authority relates that he claimed without turning a hair to have been to Folkestone and back again.

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 42 - 53)

Hatchjaw remarks (unconfirmed, however, by Bassett) that throughout the whole ten years that went to the writing of The Country Album de Selby was obsessed with mirrors and had recourse to them so frequently that he claimed to have two left hands and to be living in a world arbitrarily bounded by a wooden frame. As time went on he refused to countenance a direct view of anything and had a small mirror permanently at a certain angle in front of his eyes by a wired mechanism of his own manufacture. After he had resorted to this fantastic arrangement, he interviewed visitors with his back to them and with his head inclined towards the ceiling; he was even credited with long walks backwards in crowded thoroughfares. Hatchjaw claims that his statement is supported by the MS. of some three hundred pages of the Album, written backwards, ‘a circumstance that made necessary the extension of the mirror principle to the bench of the wretched printer.’ (De Selby’s Life and Times, p. 221.) This manuscript cannot now be found.

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 77)

Dortmunder had learned patience at great cost. The trial and error of life among human beings had taught him that whenever a bunch of them began to jump up and down and shout at cross-purposes, the only thing a sane man could do was sit back and let them sort it out for themselves. No matter how long it took. The alternative was to try to attract their attention, either with explanations of the misunderstanding or with a return to the original topic of conversation, and to make that attempt meant that sooner or later you too would be jumping up and down and shouting at cross-purposes. Patience, patience; at the very worst, they would finally wear themselves out.

— Bank shot by Donald E. Westlake (Page 93)

She made a two-word comment about Griffin and his mother that was probably more ritual than fact,...

— Dead skip by Joe Gores (Page 97)

Abe Clinger was a businessman, not a crook. It was his nature to be a businessman, and only the force of circumstances had him temporarily playing the part of a crook, a temporary condition that had lasted now about twelve years.

— The Seventh by Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark (Page 107)

Sometimes it was a bad thing to be devoid of small talk. If he'd had meaningless little conversations with her the last few weeks he might have learned something he could use now. But Parker couldn't stand meaningless conversations, couldn't think of anything to say or any reason to say it.

— The Seventh by Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark (Page 73)