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TGIFF (Thank God It's Friday Fiction): Literary Quotes About the Weekend

Glory be to the weekend! The 48-hour (well, 55-hour, if you count from 5 p.m. Friday on) respite from the trials and trousers of the work week. Remember the onslaught of work on Monday and the carry-over on Tuesday? No one does! It’s history! Right now the only concerns that matter are which cocktails you will brew this evening and whether or not you’ll be invited to the dinner party in your new favorite Jane Austen video game. You can make a list of all the things you want to do and try this month (planners always win...) or maybe you will spend your Saturday replacing all your possibly contaminated spices.

Whether or not your weekend promises a series of parties or crossword puzzles, let’s heed the advice of Shel Silverstein, Miranda July, and more authors and relish the splendor of these 55 (yes, every hour counts) hours of bliss. Here are some of our favorite fiction authors' words about the magnificence of the weekend.

Image: quinndombrowski/flickr

by Claire Luchette

Gillian Flynn

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me.

—from Gone Girl

Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Shel Silverstein

My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,My temperature is one-o-eight.My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,There's a hole inside my ear.I have a hangnail, and my heart is ...What? What's that? What's that you say?You say today is .............. Saturday?G'bye, I'm going out to play!

-from the poem "Sick"

Jack Kerouac

They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.

—from On the Road

Barbara Kingsolver

In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull everything out of the laundry basket to make a bird's nest and sit in it, fine. Dellarobia could even sit in there with them and incubate, if she so desired. Household chores no longer called her name exclusively. She had an income. She'd never before understood how much her life in this little house had felt to her like confinement in a sinking vehicle after driving off a bridge. ... To open a hatch and swim away felt miraculous. Working outside the home took her about fifty yards from her kitchen, which was far enough. She couldn't see the dishes in the sink.

from Flight Behavior

Image: David Wood

Miranda July

Just the weekend before, I had danced in a sexy way for the first time; my butt and the beat had connected in a way that portended great things in my future.

-from the short story "Making Love in 2003"

Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

J.D. Salinger

Let's just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me.

—from Franny and Zooey

Zadie Smith

On Saturday morning she is free! ... In this weekend abandon there is always something manic and melancholy: the internal countdown to the working week already begun.

—from NW

Henry S. Dziekan III/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
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