Ten years ago, I became friends with Glenburne on a
Narnia forum. Her name is actually Elizabeth, but by the time that I
learned this, I had already met another Elizabeth forum member in
person, and it was too confusing to have two Elizabeths. Thus, she has
remained Glenburne or Glen throughout the ages.
I did a quote post for Glen years ago, and she also contributed to Evangelistic Library Pick-Up Lines, a blog post I forgot about until I rediscovered it while drafting this post. It’s glorious. I laughed hysterically. I should have done quote posts for Glen in 2019 and 2020, but I forgot both times, mainly because November is National Novel Writing Month. I am now here to remedy my errors, and we shall travel in time together through her quotes.
But first, here are some quotes that are out of chronological order, so that this can be the preview photo for the Facebook link. Glen recently created a particularly interesting solution in the Jackbox game Patently Stupid, and I told her immediately afterwards that I was going to put it in her quote post. Here we go.
The problem was “I can’t sleep without plotting stories.”
She talked up her submission by saying, “There is a solution that is exactly what it looks like… Illegal drugs!”
“…Also, if the police happen to arrest you and bust you for drugs, you will also have lots of time to sleep and write while you are in jail!”
2016-2019:
“I did the free download, because I have no money and therefore no conscience.”
“The moment when you realize you promised to ship books out ‘when they arrives.’ And you begin to worry that you’re turning into Gollum. Because books are just that precious.”
“Strong women in The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel. Arwen. Eowyn. Shelob.”
“Things I learned at the library this week:
* Apparently the Library of Congress will not accept ‘Cucumbers--Drama’ as a subject heading. Sorry, VeggieTales.
* Yes, people do make tax appointments and subsequently forget where they made them. And then call the library to figure it out.
* There is a person who has really set their voicemail to feature half a minute of cats meowing before telling you to leave a message at the beep.”
Reviewing a book by Plato: “Interesting – though obviously a great deal has been added to the conversation over the past few millennia.”
“Let’s just say that we like to keep our patrons close, and our sanitary wipes closer.”
“It’s been a while since anyone got into the presidential office without being recognized as the Antichrist by somebody, so....”
“In other library news, today I’ve encountered a YA book in which the main character starts noticing her captors’ hairstyles almost immediately after waking up from a concussion, and a romance novel titled Dark Desires after Dark. There is a day for genre stereotypes to be overthrown, but it is not this day.”
“The more mold I find in my bedroom, the more I understand why Leviticus says that after the mold has stuck around for a while you should just give up and burn the house down.”
“Goodreads tells me that the longest book I read last year is also the one I hated the most. I am resentful.”
“My brother has decided that telling people ‘Find your own truth’ is a legitimate way to deal with unwanted questions.”
“The existence of ‘cozy’ murder mysteries is one of the clearest evidences of man's depravity. Seriously, what kind of warped human being titles a book A Very Merry Murder?”
“Came across a car with a personalized license plate that said, ‘Morbid.’ Still deciding whether I would like to meet the owner.”
“One of my patrons made me get them a book called Vibrational Money Immersion, and the title alone has me feeling sorry for the human race.”
“My brother says that Jar Jar is the best part of The Phantom Menace. Please send help.”
“A guy left a message at the reference desk saying he had a vision of Jesus and some aliens, and would we find him an astronomer or astrologer who could give him information about the alien spaceship. I gave him the phone number for the local planetarium, because I hate humanity.”
“When your patron requests a book that makes you want to put a ‘This is damnable heresy’ on the front cover, but you know that’s unprofessional. (And yes, I mean actual, denying-the-Apostles’-Creed heresy, not whatever passes for heresy in the dark lands of Christian Twitter.)”
“That sense of impending doom as you use up yet another roll of toilet paper.”
“I always feel inspired to think more deeply when I am called a sheeple.”
“This pandemic is encouraging me to indulge all my ruder impulses: refusing hugs, standing at a distance from people, aggressively wiping things that someone touched right in front of them.... I take it that my sanctification will resume once a vaccine is developed.”
November 2020, when we were supposed to say what we were thankful for: “I am thankful that I’m not as evil as everyone apparently thinks I am.”
“See, I just want everyone to do the no-screaming-on-the-roller-coaster thing ALL THE TIME. And do it everywhere. No screaming. Resist the urge.”
“I am basically unable to scream in general. This frustrates my mom, because I don’t understand why she sometimes shrieks when she’s surprised. Back when I was twelve, I did have to scream once for a skit, and I sounded like a buffalo being murdered.”
About the children’s song lyric ‘If the devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on a tack’: “For a while I thought that verse might be too flippant, but at this point I am extremely sure Luther would defend it.”
“Baseball doesn’t even come to mind when I hear ‘The New York Yankees!’ I’m not even sure what sport it is.”
“My siblings have decided that Tyranny is definitely a girl’s name.”
“You could try being one of the creepier Irish fairies, Mike. Tall people are not without options. Good night!”
“Maybe nothing explains how much my area has changed over time than the fact that the town newspaper used to publish the name of literally every local who was admitted to the hospital.”
“My favorite part of watching movies with my middle brother is yelling jointly at the screen if it gets too sappy.”
“I would just settle for people knowing that crocheting is not, in fact, knitting. I have not knitted since my early teens but get accused of it regularly.”
“Thinking back, I’m pretty sure that the first time I clearly understood this—that salvation by faith does not in any way depend on the Sinner’s Prayer—might have been from reading a Gilbert Morris inspirational romance that my grandmother had stashed in her basement. It wasn’t a good book! But it’s... revelatory just how much of my teenage theological processing happened through Christian cultural products that were not really intended to teach doctrine.”
“That moment when you’re watching a movie, and the villain has a bookshelf, and you stop and rewind the movie multiple times in a futile effort to figure out what he’s been reading.”
About Facebook Messenger features: “I apparently can’t do the whale react on the computer I’m using, but I can create a poll or beg you for money.”
“Our computers were always junk, so we probably didn’t have a lot of stuff that would have been available otherwise. I remember solitaire. And (this is very exciting!) we also even had spider solitaire.”
“I had to wean myself off a solitaire addiction in high school. ....That sounds extremely pathetic.”
“For the record, I have never thought about arson or kidnapping, just murder.”
“I wanted to understand the religious aspects of Fullmetal Alchemist, so I got a giant book about Shintoism from inter-library loan. One day, I left it sitting on the dashboard of my car while I went into church, and it really bothered my mom.”
On a writing night, discussing how we write about religion in both imaginary and real worlds: “This is where D is wiser than the rest of us, because she can just write about actual Jesus!”
“I did not put in the murder one! I want to point that out.”
“Planning to write an Amish vampire romance and post the entire text into the group chat.”
About my unfinished Christian fiction parody from 2010: “So far this sounds less like a parody than like the genuine article.”
“1st level: Embarrassing your parents
“2nd level: Embarrassing your siblings
“3rd level: Embarrassing your stuffed animals.”
In group chat: “Poor Jason. I am 1000% on board with his aversion to the happy birthday song.”
On Twitter later that day: “The Happy Birthday song is a form of cruel and unusual punishment and ought to be banned under the 8th Amendment. Here I stand etc.”
“My mom avoided using these sheep towels for 30 years but recently broke, and it has brought her great delight that I find the big fluffy blobness on them even more disturbing than she does.”
The next three quotes are excerpts from a scathing book review:
“Over the past few years I’ve felt increasingly bad for Joseph and Grace Plunkett, the couple who are the subject of the Irish rebel song ‘Grace.’ It’s unpleasant enough to have a hasty wedding in prison, knowing that one of you is going to be executed a few hours later. The last thing you need is for people to write annoyingly sentimental songs about the experience. However, after reading this book of Joseph Plunkett’s collected poems, I have concluded that Joseph, at least, was melodramatic enough in his artistic tastes that he would probably have gone for the song without a second thought.”
“At any rate, he was only twenty-nine when he was executed, so maybe his poetry would have improved if he had grown older. Sadly, he did not have the opportunity.”
“As the introduction rather terrifyingly notes that Plunkett’s poorer poems were intentionally excluded from this collection, I really doubt that the difficulty of his poetry is a sign that I am missing out on its greatness. A greater poet would probably have been much more intelligible.”
About the above review: “I like reading really obscure books by very dead people so that when I write insulting Goodreads reviews about them literally nobody cares.”
“Because what’s the point in being a superhero if you aren’t dating a series of really horrible people all the time?”
When Elizabeth lamented that her initials are EW: “You’ve just… got a lot of names, so I didn’t think about it. It feels sort of like being friends with a British Navy battleship. The E. H. M. Wheeler.”
“I was looking at sci-fi mag submissions requirements the other day and ran into one that specifically banned anyone from sending them pandemic-themed stories.”
“No story is complete without religious guilt.”
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