3 O'clock High Quotes

It was nine o’clock in the morning, and way too goddamn early for anything that wasn’t coffee and a bullet to the head.

The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other. Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --- indeed, is --- one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings. Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done. To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody. In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular. This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult the Universe.

What’s so amusing, wench?” came a gravel-throated voice from behind her, followed by a gentle swat across her sheet-covered backside. “Just plotting my mutiny, Captain,” she said. “Mutiny?” he said, pulling the sheet, and her, closer to him. “I thought I’d convinced you to join my merry little band of thieves.” He tugged at the sheet she’d grabbed in her fist, rolling her neatly over and right up against his side. “You don’t want to be the pirate queen of the high seas?” “You’re a merry band of one who can’t sail a boat, so--” He silenced her with a kiss. When he finally lifted his head, she sighed and let her head loll back on his arm. “Well, when you put it that way…” He rolled on top of her, making her squeal. “I’m happy to put it another way, if that’ll help persuade you.” “Sheath your sword, pirate king. Your wench needs some sustenance before she can allow you to have your pirate ways with her again.” “I thought I was sheathing my sword,” he said, then laughed when she hooked her leg over his and rolled him to his back. “I see you’ve been paying attention to my pirate tricks.” “Indeed I have,” she said, looking down into his handsome face and twinkling blue eyes. She didn’t want to think about the next chapter, not now, not yet. But there it was, staring up at her, framed in tousled blond hair and five o’clock shadow. This could be your life, Kerry McCrae. Just say yes.

The age of magic began at four o’clock on the afternoon of May 3, 1453, when the high-dimensional fragment first intersected with the Earth. It ended at nine o’clock on the evening of May 28, 1453, when the fragment left the Earth behind. After twenty-five days and five hours, the world returned to its normal orbit.