“How ambitious was he? He wanted to dunk the moon, and hang on the rim.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 29
And That’s a Category
“He was a decent and well-meaning man in the main, but he was a good man without categories. And a good man without categories is sometimes not a very good man.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 23
And Onto the Floor
“But Ace was on a slow boil, and wasn’t sure when he was going to foam all over the stove—but he was pretty sure he was going to.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 18
Basic Theology
“This is not really a theology issue . . . well, okay, it is. Everything is. But not theology theology . . . this is ‘how water isn’t dry’ theology.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 16
Introducing Sally
“It was a newer model sex android, from the looks of it, although she was completely dressed. She was decked out like a suburban housewife, a blue bandanna on her head just like it was moving day, and she was staring vacantly, straight ahead. Her lips had that come-hither pout, that sexy look, like she had just been hit in the mouth with a brick.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 14
And Without Any Insurance Coverage for That
“Some women are just plain gorgeous, and they don’t really know how to turn it off, but Stephanie was not like that. She was entirely secure without any make-up, and was routinely described as ‘that pretty girl,’ but whenever she decided to put on the Ritz, the effect was to summon up an oceanic goddess of beauty de profundis. And if she smiled at anything male while done up like that, he would probably be in the ICU for at least a couple of days.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 9
Almost as Good
“When it came to the jargon of servant leadership, no one could even get near him.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 6
Green Needs a Word
“The lawn was so green that if green had a word in its semantic family like red does—that word being vermilion—only that word and no other would have sufficed. Well, maybe the green equivalent of incarnadine might have sufficed, if the light was good.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 5
That Kind of Dog
“The downtown area of Denver had gone rapidly to the dogs—and by ‘the dogs,’ the reference is not to show poodles owned by rich ladies or anything refined and decadent like that. Rather, the dogs that everything had ‘gone to’ would be more like the mangier packs that roam in and around the landfills outside Manila, the kind that would eat dead vultures and call it a treat.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 3
Black Swans Are Invisible While Approaching
“Whenever something like this happens, as it has from time to time in the annals of geopolitics, any competent historian can, after the fact, show how the subsequent events that proved so momentous, and which crept up on everybody from behind, and which virtually no one predicted, were in actual fact some kind of inevitable. The whole thing was going to happen, somehow, someway. This kind of inevitability is a strange creature of time, being only visible from the rear and never from the front. Historians can see it clearly, but prognosticators, for some reason, cannot.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, pp. 1-2