“If the yellow patent leather flats fit...”

“Out of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, Soho in particular had the charged atmosphere of a movie set, populated with passersby who looked like extras from Central Casting, so perfectly did they fit into this environment. There was the feeling of everything being not quite real, or too perfectly cliched to actually be true, and it began to rain in a fine, misty drizzle from a black patent leather sky.”

“A voice flat enough to fit under a door crack.”

“I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.”

“But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go- You can live here. You can rest here. You can fit. The enormous skies of the Southwest, the shadows that fell over the desert mountains, the innumerable cacti- red-tipped, or yellow-blossomed, or flat-headed- all this had lightened him when he first moved... ...But as with them all, the same hopeful differences--...-- they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn't, in fact, fit.”

“Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.”