Marvel Comic Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Marvel Comic. Here they are! All 100 of them:

With great power comes great responsibility.
Stan Lee
Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.
Stan Lee
Excelsior!
Stan Lee
Guess that's thirty-one pieces of silver you've got now, huh? Sleep well, Judas.
Mark Millar (Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event)
Your humans slaughter each other because of the color of your skin, or your faith or your plitics -- or for no reason at all -- too many of you hate as easily as you draw breath. - Magneto
Stan Lee
There is only one who is all powerful, and his greatest weapon is love.
Stan Lee
HULK SMASH!
Stan Lee
Coming from your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!
Stan Lee
Nuff said!
Stan Lee
The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.-The Watcher in The Avengers #14
Stan Lee (Essential Avengers, Vol. 1)
When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth, and tell the whole world 'No, You Move.
J. Michael Straczynski
Luck's a revolving door, you just need to know when it's your time to walk through.
Stan Lee
I'm with you until the end of the line.
Marvel Comics
Nevermore shall men make slaves of others! Not in Asgard--not on Earth--not any place where the hammer of Thor can be swung--or where men of good faith hold freedom dear!
Stan Lee
For men must never feel a cause is hopeless-- men must never feel an enemy cannot be beaten!
Stan Lee
I said, “Juvenile delinquents eat chocolate cake, so chocolate cake must cause juvenile delinquency,” but nobody listened to me. I wasn’t on TV.
Stan Lee
Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?
Stan Lee
In the beginning Marvel created the Bullpen and the Style. And the Bullpen was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the Artists. And the Spirit of Marvel said, Let there be The Fantasic Four. And there was The Fantasic Four. And Marvel saw The Fantasic Four. And it was good.
Stan Lee
Wives should be kissed - not heard.
Stan Lee (Essential Fantastic Four, Vol. 4)
The only advice anybody can give is if you want to be a writer, keep writing. And read all you can, read everything.
Stan Lee
I felt like I could never get enough of you even if I melted into you like snow on wet grass.
Marvel Comics (Rogue)
There must always be those with the fire of rebellion in their blood! There must always be those who will dare to fight an unbeatable enemy! Only thus can the race of man remain strong and fearless!
Stan Lee
And now, until we meet again, may the blessings of Asgard be showered upon you!
Stan Lee
Good" and "Bad" may be alien concepts to him, Ben.
Stan Lee
Have you ever seen a little girl run so fast she falls down? There's an instant, a fraction of a second before the world catches hold of her again... A moment when she's outrun every doubt and fear she's ever had about herself and she flies. In that one moment, every little girl flies. I need to find that again. Like taking a car out into the desert to see how fast it can go, I need to find the edge of me... And maybe, if I fly far enough, I'll be able to turn around and look at the world... And see where I belong.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
You know, I guess one person can make a difference. 'Nuff said...
Stan Lee
Duane just kept working, not even looking up.
Stan Lee
and one of our vocabulary words was nonconformist. I just dug that word. I heard the explanation, the definition, and I felt like I had just learned about a new hero in a kick-ass Marvel comic book.
Nick Offerman (Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Principles for Delicious Living)
The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.
Stan Lee
Forced idleness is a terrible thing.
Stan Lee (Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee)
Let's lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them—to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are.
Stan Lee
Gamora: History repeating itself? Warlock: History doesn't repeat itself, Gamora, but sometimes it rhymes.
Dan Abnett (Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy)
Through lightest dark or darkest light, You dont need no bling to join the fight. We're mercs with mouths and so much more, Yippee-ki-yay, we're the Deadpool Corps!
Deadpool
I'm a disciple of the Tao of Peter Parker, obviously,
Jim Butcher (Death Masks (The Dresden Files, #5))
No one bad is ever truly bad, and no one good is ever truly good
Michael Waldron
Life at best is bittersweet.
Jack Kirby
Fear is not a choice.
Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel (2014-2015) #10)
I've been ready to die since before you was Born!
Marvel Comics
Marvel is a cornucopia of fantasy, a wild idea, a swashbuckling attitude, an escape from the humdrum and the prosaic. It's a serendipitous feast for the mind, the eye, the imagination, a literate celebration of unbridled creativity, coupled with a touch of rebellion and an insolent desire to spit in the eye of the dragon.
Stan Lee (Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee)
Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil, but of Marvel Comics' collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.
Grant Morrison (Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human)
Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes...Here? On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards... And over the wall behind closed doors: other things-people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for "reasons of national security
Joe Sacco (Palestine)
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
Hilaire Belloc
You and what army of snaggled toothed wine sots?
Marvel Comics
You’re not a true fan if you only like the Marvel movies; you can’t be in the anime community unless you speak fluent Japanese; you’re not allowed to dress up as Ms. Marvel unless you’ve read every Ms. Marvel comic, ever.
Sam Maggs (The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy: A Handbook for Girl Geeks)
THOU ART NO THOR!
Mark Millar (Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event)
Remember, America... not Wind like a watch, but Wind... like the air...
Frank Miller (Elektra: Assassin)
Sympathy once more reveals its limits when faced with madness.
José Alaniz (Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond)
On the front cover of Newsweek reviews "A House for Mr. Biswas" as "a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.
V.S. Naipaul (A House for Mr Biswas)
Warlock: Four thousand and fifty-three metric tons of inert rock, metal and organic matter, frozen solid. Quasar: Frozen in what? Drax: Time. Quasar: "Time", Drax? Drax: Uh-huh. Old, old frozen time. Quasar: Right. And that tastes like what? Drax: Regret.
Dan Abnett (Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy)
To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.
Alan Moore
It was a community of scholars just outside of adolescence, a sort of Marvel comic where every hero represented a different arm of the humanities.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2))
I noticed a copy of X-Men, a Marvel comic he loved, in his backpack, which was lying open on his crossed legs. Sometimes it seemed a part of those characters lived inside him. Peter wasn’t your classic knight in shining armor; he was a complex hero full of doubts and conflicting emotions who suffered from unrequited love.
Elisa S. Amore (Touched (Touched, #1))
Damn. How much time did you spend in the library?" “I am a library.
Brian K. Vaughan (Runaways Deluxe, Vol. 3)
For the next life, screw everybody. Oh who am I fooling? I don't want a next life. I just want a nap.
Matt Fraction (Hawkeye, Volume 1: My Life as a Weapon)
A superhero is just an ordinary person who has found a better way to mask their human frailties.
Stewart Stafford
Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something WRONG is something RIGHT. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole WORLD tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world-- --"No, YOU move.
Mark Millar (Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event)
It’s hard to look back on your life and point to one event–one moment–that changed everything and set you on the path that made you…you. That only happens in movies. Most people’s lives are a series of millions of messy little moments strung together adding up to a messy little life. But sometimes, you can look back and see a pattern forming… see a clear path cutting through the mess. It makes you wonder, do we even have a choice at all? Or was that path going to form no matter what we did? Yeah, it’s easy to look back and see the pattern. It’s easy to second-guess every decision you made and figure out what you would’ve done differently. But none of that much matters now. It’s all in the past. Can’t waste time thinking about who i was, who i could’ve been. All that matters now is who i am.
Jeff Lemire (All-New Hawkeye (2015) #5)
But once again, he would learn, Marvel’s fate lay in the hands of people who knew nothing about comic books. Out in Los Angeles, as soon as the sale was made, Rehme had summoned his vice president of marketing and proudly told him, “We just bought Superman.
Sean Howe (Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)
The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change.
José Alaniz (Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond)
Reading is very good.
Stan Lee
Those you underestimate will devour you.
Elissa Karasik
Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus??.
Junot Díaz
Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless...were the proper readers of Marvel comics.
Rick Moody (The Ice Storm)
The scene reminded Lita of a Marvel Comics movie where the hero tries to blend in among mortals, but is so obviously everyone’s savior. Her savior. If he would only allow himself to be.
Tessa Bailey (Rough Rhythm (Made in Jersey, #1.5))
Although Jerry Siegel didn’t bring it up with people, a swirl of whispers followed as he made his way in and out of the office: That guy co-created Superman. DC Comics won’t even let him in their offices anymore
Sean Howe (Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)
When we read Beguine accounts of annihilations, illuminations & awakenings we’re not idling the day away in some safe little Marvel comic or Hitchhiker’s Guide wonderment. We’re reading of the soul exploding into our insanely normal world in a blessedly abnormal state of awareness!
David James Duncan (Sun House)
Disability fluctuates, growing visible, then invisible, then visible again, becoming both ever-present and haunting. Such a problematizing of physical life added a new wrinkle to the genre's double/secret identity trope: the characters now interact with their shifting bodies as bodies with all the complications involved.
José Alaniz (Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond)
We're on our way to rescue a queen, overthrow an evil wizard, and win back a country. Care to join us? - Wolverine (Doomwar #1)
Jonathan Maberry (Doomwar)
I am inevitable." - Thanos
Thanos
I guess that’s what being Spider-Man means. Helping everyone, even when it doesn’t seem like a huge deal.
Brittney Morris (Wings of Fury (Spider-Man: Miles Morales))
(Marvel belongs to Disney, DC to Time Warner) that are the kingpins of superhero comics.
Douglas Wolk (Comic-Con Strikes Again!)
Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
Bill Bixby as Dr. David Banner
All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it's all just to lure an ending into your bed.
Catherynne M. Valente (Radiance)
The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.
José Alaniz (Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond)
Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.
Billy Collins (Picnic, Lightning)
My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
DC’s gamble on creators and unique voices paid off, producing what is perhaps the most fertile period in the company’s—and the industry’s—history. This was the moment comics finally grew up and began to be taken seriously.
Reed Tucker (Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC)
If you’re not falling, you’re not really trying hard enough. JOE QUESADA Joe Quesada is an award-winning comics creator and the chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment, who served as editor-in chief of Marvel for over a decade.
Brian Michael Bendis (Words for Pictures: The Art and Business of Writing Comics and Graphic Novels)
This was a school that didn’t just teach history — no, it wore the past like a comfortable jacket, beloved for all of its frayed ends. Gansey II described students — comrades, really — forming bonds of brotherhood that would last for the rest of their lives. It was C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Yeats and the Abbey Theatre, Tolkien and his Kolbítar, Glendower and his poet Iolo Goch, Arthur and his knights. It was a community of scholars just outside of adolescence, a sort of Marvel comic where every hero represented a different arm of the humanities.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2))
As you explore the Marvel story, it becomes another world you can call your own, one that's constantly expanding and full of unfinished wonders. You can no more exhaust its possibilities than the real world's. (I have tried.) And spending time in that world can make you better equipped to live in the real one: more curious about how its systems fit together; more willing to explore what you don't yet understand, and accept that you can't know everything; more open to hope in the face of catastrophe; more aware that no matter how overwhelming your own life may seem, it's only part of a much bigger picture.
Douglas Wolk (All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told)
Marvel and DC comics dealt with fantastical characters but at least they sent them on recognisable journeys, providing them with origin stories, personal tragedies (the villain Magneto was revealed to be a Holocaust survivor), love affairs, psychological issues, political awakenings and all the rest of it.
Anthony Horowitz (The Word is Murder (Hawthorne & Horowitz #1))
We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.
José Alaniz (Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond)
We cannot call ourselves anti-theist, like New Atheism, while creating even rainbow pantheons of gods to follow, chasing ideological spectres to the end of illogical rainbow arguments constructed and maintained artificially by ignorant leaders. When we do this we not only create strawmen, spectres, and artificial rainbows but pocket dimensions of subjective thought that can be likened to the Twilight Zone. In this place things will not be more real but be like a Marvel comics version of both biblical and Norse heroes that are created solely for the readers recreation and for corporate sales. We will end up selling our souls for ideological satisfaction.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (The Bifrost and The Ark: Examining the Cult and Religion of New Atheism)
If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.
José Alaniz (Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond)
And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization—Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of a Domino’s pizza box.
Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life's paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. has a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief.
Jill Leovy (Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America)
There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life's paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. had a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief.
Jill Leovy (Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America)
You fellas think of comics in terms of comic books, but you’re wrong. I think you fellas should think of comics in terms of drugs, in terms of war, in terms of journalism, in terms of selling, in terms of business. And if you have a viewpoint on drugs, or if you have a viewpoint on war, or if you have a viewpoint on the economy, I think you can tell it more effectively in comics than you can in words. I think nobody is doing it. Comics is journalism. But now it’s restricted to soap opera.
Sean Howe (Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)
If he does find himself back in the mountain of Marvels, or if he never leaves it, I hope he finds its glorious imaginary world changing all the time, keeping pace with the real one in which he lives, and I hope he appreciates it for changing. I hope, too, that what he cares about is the story itself -- the characters, the images, the imaginative leaps and eleventh-hour improvisations that hold it together -- and its creators, rather than the business entity that stamped a logo everywhere on it. A story can never leave you; a corporation can never love you back.
Douglas Wolk (All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told)
Perverse? Because they obey the only law of life; because they are satisfied with the only need of life, which is love? But consider, milady, the flower is only a reproductive organ. Is there anything healthier, stronger, or more beautiful than that? These marvelous petals, these silks, these velvets... these soft, supple, and caressing materials are the curtains of the alcove, the draperies of the bridal chamber, the perfumed bed where they unite, where they pass their ephemeral and immortal life, swooning with love. What an admirable example for us!” he spread the petals of the flower, counted the stamens laden with pollen, and he spoke again, his eyes swimming in a comical ecstasy: “See, milady; one, two, five, ten, twenty. See how they quiver! Look! Sometimes twenty males are required for the delight of a single female! he! he! he! Sometimes it’s the opposite.” one by one he tore off the petals of the flower: “And when they are gorged with love, then the curtains of the bed are torn away, the draperies of the chamber wither and fall; and the flowers die, because they know well they have nothing more to do. They die, to be reborn later, and once again, to love!
Octave Mirbeau (The Torture Garden)
In March 1970, Lee again turned to the Soapbox to lay out Marvel’s policy on “moralizing.” Some readers simply wanted escapist reading, but Lee countered: “I can’t see it that way.” He compared a story without a message to a person without a soul. Giving the reader insight into his world, Lee explained that his visits to college campuses led to “as much discussion of war and peace, civil rights, and the so-called youth rebellion as . . . of our Marvel mags.” All these ideas, Lee said, shape our lives. No one should run from them or think that reading comic books might insulate someone from important societal topics.8
Bob Batchelor (Stan Lee: The Man behind Marvel)
I personaggi dei fumetti raccolgono le tendenze inconsapevoli del tempo, diventando i portavoce di tali tendenze. Proprio perché le persone riescono a identificarsi così pienamente in loro, i personaggi dvengono parte del mito. I personaggi di Stan Lee hanno fatto tutto ciò negli anni Sessanta. Lui si è riallacciato ai sentimenti contro l'ordine costituito, all'alienazione e all'autosvalutazione... Stan ha usato personaggi con l'alito cattivo e l'acne, più punk, più giovani, in un momento in cui i giovani avevano bisogno di simboli che prendessero il posto di molte delle cose che respingevano." Citazione di Lenette Kahn, DC Comics - pag. 155
Bob Batchelor (Stan Lee. il Padre dell'universo Marvel)
Steve Englehart’s latest idea for Doctor Strange was appropriately zany: Strange and his lover/apprentice Clea would be whisked back in time to explore “The Occult History of America,” an adventure that would put them in contact with notable Freemasons like Francis Bacon, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Clea and Benjamin Franklin would have a torrid affair—cuckolding Strange—as they sailed from England to bear witness to the occult-influenced drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, they’d return to the present, where the evil sorcerer Stygro was vampirically feeding off the energy of American patriotism. “It seemed like the thing to do for the bicentennial,” Englehart said.
Sean Howe (Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)
the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose. This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
Riley: I have to ask you something. Heroine: Shoot… Riley: Bear with me. I can’t believe that we haven’t discussed this yet so I’m a little nervous. Heroine: Now I’m nervous. Riley: You have nothing to worry about. Your life will continue just fine. It’s mine that might come crashing down here. Riley: How do you feel about comics and superheroes? Heroine: DC or Marvel? Heroine: Nevermind, that’s a terrible question. I’d never want to choose. I love the ensembles. The Avengers, the X-Men, the Justice League. Heroine: But I haven’t read any in 20 years. I’ve caught up with the movies as they’ve been released, though. Most of them have been really good. Heroine: Are you still with me? Riley: Yes. Sorry. I just spontaneously orgasmed. Heroine: What? Riley: Nothing. But I’ll talk to you later. Something just popped up.
Kate Canterbary (Preservation (The Walshes, #7))
Seated at his own desk looking out on the overgrown garden, he marvels at what the little banjo is teaching him. Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa’s and Byron’s: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line. So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!
J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace)
Over the decade that movie producer Menahem Golan had retained the rights for Spider-Man, he’d managed to involve half a dozen different corporate entities. Golan had originally bought the Spider-Man rights for his Cannon Films; after leaving Cannon, he transferred them to 21st Century Films. Next, he raised money by preselling television rights to Viacom, and home video rights to Columbia Tri-Star; then he signed a $5 million deal with Carolco that guaranteed his role as producer. But after Carolco assigned the film to James Cameron, Cameron refused to give Golan the producer credit, and the lawsuits began. By the end of 1994, Carolco was suing Viacom and Tri-Star; Viacom and Tri-Star were countersuing Carolco, 21st Century, and Marvel; and MGM—which had swallowed Cannon—was suing Viacom, Tri-Star, 21st Century, and Marvel.
Sean Howe (Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)
The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.
Ron Padget
On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds. Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions. Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like. Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.
Robert Roper (Cuervo Tales)
On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds.
 Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions.
 Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like.
 Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.
Robert Roper (Cuervo Tales)