A Commonplace Page 

The criers and the kibitzers. The criers, earnest, complaining with a peculiar vigor about their businesses, their gas mileage, their health; their despair articulate, dependably lamenting their lives, vaguely mourning conditions, their sorrow something they could expect no one to understand. The kibitzers, deaf to grief, winking confidentially at the others, their voices high-pitched in kidding or lowered in conspiracy to tell of triumphs, of men they knew downtown, of tickets fixed or languishing goods moved suddenly and unexpectedly, of the windfall that was life; their fingers sticky, smeared with the sugar from their rolls.

Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers by Stanley Elkin in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, 1980

She stuck out her chest and saluted. “Uniform. Badge. Big gun. A gun is a substitute penis. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t go to college,” Dave said.

The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of by Joseph Hanson, 1978

It is dangerous to place too much hope in any improvement coming from just following new fashions, if we lack insight into what really went wrong before.

More Taste: Less Greed? by C. H. Forsyth

These social spaces run into the same content crunch that games do. And then worse, they run into the problem that a lot of people come in and say, “Well, what do I do? I understand that if you hand me a sword and there’s a spider over there, I can go and hack it. But I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do if I’m just here with other people.”

Changing Realities by Cory Ondrejka at the 22nd Chaos Communications Congress, Berlin, 2005

Two women in sweaters stroll down Kramgasse, arm in arm, laughing with such abandon that they could be thinking no thought of the future.

Einstein’s Dream by Alan Lightman, 1993

I don’t care for dogs. They combine creep and crap to a degree found only otherwise in PR men.

Threatened Species by Reginald Hill in Pascoe’s Ghost, 1979