Dale Peck

“I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you tell me more about this 'profanity'?"Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. "I'll assume you don't need a definition. Perhaps you'd prefer an example?""That would be so helpful, thank you very much."Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to be born out of wedlock. AS for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of names so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would've wished he'd been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a verity of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would've given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to a single-cell stage, forever free of taint of mitosis, let alone procreation. Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed I'd snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain. "Guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh," I said, by which I meant: "You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain." Nervously, I climbed back into my chair, the two halves of my pencil sticking out of ears like an arrow that had shot clean through my head. Mrs. Miller allowed herself a small self-congratulatory smile.”

“Sometimes when we think we’re protecting ourselves, we’re really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.”

“Your past comes with you no matter where you go.”

“You show me a teenager who doesn’t like to be flattered and I’ll show you a teenager who’s got a steady source of sex.”

“People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.”

“Children," Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed."I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good," she stressed, "because it is the right thing to do.You are very formidable adversaries, but don’t you see that when you work against eachother, you just cancel eachother out?”

“Drift House: Susan's response to Queen Octavia's sarcasm in regards to fading memories..."But we pass our memories on," she insisted. "I mean, from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children. They write things down, tell them stories--”