{"id":1158,"date":"2008-03-26T12:06:16","date_gmt":"2008-03-26T16:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/26\/dismissed-with-a-touch-of-ceremony\/"},"modified":"2008-03-31T22:35:40","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T02:35:40","slug":"dismissed-with-a-touch-of-ceremony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/26\/dismissed-with-a-touch-of-ceremony\/","title":{"rendered":"Dismissed with a touch of ceremony"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I\u2019ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>I never saw any of them again\u2014except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cYes,\u201d  I said. \u201cIsn\u2019t it pretty to think so?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What do these lines <a href=\"http:\/\/americanbookreview.org\/PDF\/100_Best_Last_Lines_from_Novels.pdf\">have in common<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Also, inexplicably missing from the list, what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/31\/best-first-lines\/\">should be<\/a> the paradigm case:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I said he was one of the last of the great romantics. I said there used to be two. But now there was just the one left. The hairy one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(the post title via <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Updike\">John Updike<\/a>, via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?file=\/c\/a\/2005\/01\/01\/DDG7VAJAL81.DTL\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I\u2019ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry. I never saw any of them again\u2014except the cops. No way has yet been invented&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/26\/dismissed-with-a-touch-of-ceremony\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[458,79,125],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-books","tag-lists","tag-quote","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-iG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}