“That’s when he’d run and run until he was nothing more than two feet and a pair of lungs, until he coughed blood and stank of sweat and forgot for an hour or two everything that he was and what he had to do and the people who’d get hurt along the way.”

“This time he was underwater, running, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the seabed. The surface was within reach if he raised his arms, but he couldn’t get his head out of the water. He had to breathe. The compulsion to inhale was huge. But he couldn’t, musn’t. Still he ran, getting nowhere, each frantic step burying his feet in the wet sand until he was no longer able to lift them. Finally, with one great gulp, he opened his mouth, his lungs to the flood of seawater.”

“Sometimes it’s all you can do,” he murmured. “Fight back; run wild, until you get it all out.”“Sometimes there is nothing to fight and nowhere to run.”

“A horseman of the old school, a gentleman who never forgot to dip down and stake you when he win. He was more ashamed to be stingy than to be broke, so as long as he had two dollars you had one . . .”

“I hadn’t had a mother since I was two, and from then until seven I had believed God was someone who had run off with her and was living with her somewhere else... (God took your mother, dear, because he needed her more than you do) which had never endeared him to me”

“One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.”