“In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.”

“It's one thing to be threatened. It's quite another thing to be threatened in grammatically incorrect fashion. I felt like some basic right as a literate American had been violated.”

“What the hell happened to you?" she demanded. "What took so long?""My car got towed.""Okay, but why did you swim here?""I walked. It just happens to be a hundred and fifty-seven degrees outside.”

“No way you can get stuck. Your head is much smaller. Look at this big coconut of mine. It's practically Jupiter. Yours is more like, I don't know, Mercury or something.""That doesn't mean I'm going along with an idea that you're pulling out of Uranus."We both stopped to snicker. Hard to resist a Uranus joke.”

“My entrance into the courtyard caused a small stir among the lookouts. I could tell because in the middle of February, in the dark of night, Baxter Terrace suddenly sounded like an Audubon Society refuge - birdcalls being the latest in urban drug - selling counterintelligence...Birdcalls allowed much more information to be imparted to other members of the operation, without the visitor being aware of what was being communicated. So while a crow's harsh cry could harken the arrival of a member of the city narcotics unit - a significant threat - the sweet song of a chickadee might signal an officer who was merely escorting a social worker to an appointment allowing business to continue in guarded fashion. Someone like me, a stranger on unknown business, might warrant a whipporwill's call. Where exactly a city kid learned what a whipporwill sounded like, I have no idea. But these kids were nothing if not resourceful. It makes you wonder what they could have accomplished under different circumstances.”

“I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.”

“…through the years, I had come to realize a simple fact of reporting: if you approach people with respect, listen hard, and genuinely try to understand their point of view, they will talk to you, no matter how different your background is.”