"This is unexpected... like squirt from aggressive grapefruit"
About this Quote
"Unexpected" is doing polite work here; the line wants the reader to feel ambushed. Earl Derr Biggers, a novelist who made his name on brisk plotting and punchy characterization, reaches for a bodily, slightly comic image: not just grapefruit, but an "aggressive" one, and not just flavor, but "squirt" - a word that lands with slapstick force. The intent is less poetic than tactical. It startles, resets the room, and gives a character a vivid register in a single beat: someone who reacts to surprise with sensory exaggeration rather than decorum.
The subtext is that modern life (or at least the scene at hand) is not arriving in dignified parcels. It sprays. The grapefruit metaphor smuggles in a whole attitude about control: you don't sip the moment; it hits your face. Calling the fruit "aggressive" flips agency onto the object, a neat little dodge that lets a speaker admit vulnerability without sounding weak. The humor covers the exposure.
Contextually, the phrase fits early 20th-century popular fiction's appetite for crisp, cinematic similes - language that behaves like a camera cut. Biggers wrote in an era when slangy immediacy was a selling point and mass-market prose was getting faster, wryer, more bodily. The line also brushes up against the period's fascination with "scientific" description and the sensory modern city: taste, shock, impact. It works because it's faintly improper, undeniably physical, and instantly legible; you can feel it before you can analyze it, which is exactly the point.
The subtext is that modern life (or at least the scene at hand) is not arriving in dignified parcels. It sprays. The grapefruit metaphor smuggles in a whole attitude about control: you don't sip the moment; it hits your face. Calling the fruit "aggressive" flips agency onto the object, a neat little dodge that lets a speaker admit vulnerability without sounding weak. The humor covers the exposure.
Contextually, the phrase fits early 20th-century popular fiction's appetite for crisp, cinematic similes - language that behaves like a camera cut. Biggers wrote in an era when slangy immediacy was a selling point and mass-market prose was getting faster, wryer, more bodily. The line also brushes up against the period's fascination with "scientific" description and the sensory modern city: taste, shock, impact. It works because it's faintly improper, undeniably physical, and instantly legible; you can feel it before you can analyze it, which is exactly the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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