“I hadn't learned anything new, except that another one of the Dead Elvises had an affinity for the Shop-n-Go. And Jack officially thought I'd lost my last marble.”

“I went to bed last night utterly dejected; I thought I was never going to amount to anything, and that you had thrown away your money for nothing. But what do you think? I woke up this morning with a beautiful new plot in my head, and I've been going about all day planning my characters, just as happy as I could be. No one can ever accuse me of being a pessimist! If I had a husband and twelve children swallowed by an earthquake one day, I'd bob up smilingly the next morning and commence to look for another set. ~Jershua Abbott”

“As it turned out, Welcome was where I lost everything, and gained everything. Welcome was the place where my life was guided from one track to another, ending me to places I'd never thought of going.”

“My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.”

“Nothing is as bad as it seems,' I thought with the last remnants of my dense optimism. It couldn't be. I'd already lost everything once, I'd been ten, and so had countless other people I knew, and they all picked up and kept going. Or they picked up and went in a slightly different direction.”

“As we neared the water, I pointed out an antique taxidermy shop. "My mom and I used to always go in there," I said. "It's like a zoo, except all the animals are dead.”