“The Brit's face shares a heritage with a junkyard butt-sniffing mutt. It's a hard-earned moonshine mug, dotted with a hairy mole that looks like a rat's been gnawing on it. His beard looks like a white sneeze. The teeth are jagged and out of alignment, having opened quarts at Jiffy Quick Lube for half a decade.”

“Staring at my smoldering hot date, her husband stands tall for the first time in a decade, adjusting his toupee while flashing a horrid green toothy grin that looks more like a Steven Hawkins muscle spasm. In his hands, a frightened beer bottle is choked with the steel grip of a sexually repressed Preacher.”

“Her lips full and inviting, she has an infectious laugh and glassy cackle in her eyes, and a 2000 volt sexual charisma that beckons me like a fluff girl on scuffed knees.”

“Tatiana is a ridiculously curvy thing of dreams, with smooth succulent thighs, long strawberry blond cascading beneath a teal bandana, and a nympho sparkle in her eyes that says pick me, lick me, spank me, or I punish you. Raw innocence and mayhem at once.”

“They didn't have much troubleteaching the ape to write poems:first they strapped him into a chair,then tied the pencil around his hand(the paper had already been nailed down).Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulderand whispered into his ear:'You look like a god sitting there.Why don't you try writing something?”

“If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out.”

“for my father, 1922-1944Your face did not rot like the others--the co-pilot, for example, I saw himyesterday. His face is corn-mush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stareas if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rotlike the others--it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in theirdistinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsiveorbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now,with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterestedscholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would notturn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas,or the co-pilot, Jim. Youcould return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand whatit means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at leastonce every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god,I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger's life, that I should pursue you.My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again,fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistakethat placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.”