“Romeo gritted his teeth and let the wind hit his face. Believe it, he told himself. Life with this woman will be without apologies.”

“In the picture, Ava Gardner's tousled black hair obscured her right eye, and her full, closed lips were pulled slightly to the right, resulting in something less than a smile. They looked as if they'd been smeared shut with red paint, though the photo was in black and white. It wasn't so much a fuck-me face as a I've-been-there-and-back look, the kind of expression you see only on the most expensive whores.”

“This is something an ordinary man can never know. You will enter the House of Dreams, Juanito, where you will live forever. Your mother and father and sisters and brothers, your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all you will greet in their dreams. And only you, among them, will be safe.”

“The world is really wild at heart and weird on top.”

“Zik spits into the dirt in from of home plate, his own little ritual. He digs in and grits his teeth, snarling at the Heat. Psychology. Baseball's all about psychology.”

“A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it.”

“At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild confession, this owing to a crime so outlandish, so totally different from the true ones of mating and theft of the negroes, outraged him with its insolence and perversity. In the conflict of these feelings Erasmus was swept by doubt and loneliness. His whole being seemed under threat of dissolution. What became of law, of legitimacy, of established order, if a man could assume such attitudes of private morality, decide for himself where his fault lay? It turned everything upside down. He could think of nothing more damnable. And yet… He remembered suddenly the second, rarer smile his cousin had, the one that came slowly, transforming his face. Briefly, unwillingly, Erasmus glimpsed the possibility of freedom.”