“Oh, it doesn't work at all. That's the problem! It's an endless, halting parade of inspections, bribes, and nonsense—but if you're aboard a Texas vessel, you'll find less inconvenience along the way." "It's because of their guns!" declared Mr. Henderson, once more escaping his reverie, bobbing out of it as if to gasp for air. "Concise, my love." Mrs. Henderson gave him a smile. "And correct. Texans are heavily armed and often impatient. They don't need to be transporting arms and gunpowder to create a great nuisance for anyone who stops them, so they tend to be stopped…less often.”

“She'd grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife.”

“You see, sometimes when you work by yourself in a field such as ours, it helps to share knowledge among professionals. I'm not saying that we watch one another's back or anything, because we don't. It's more of a back-scratching than a back-watching affair, as in, "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." Officially, none of us has ever heard of any of us.”

“"I don't know exactly what's wrong with you, but I bet it's hard to pronounce when you're drunk."”

“You‘re a hard negotiator, Ray-Baby.""I‘m going to get a lot harder if you call me that again." "Give me a minute. Less than a minute. I‘m almost certain I can make a filthy joke in response to that.""No", I told him. "No, for the love of God, don’t.”

“For just this moment, we have the closest thing to an advantage we're likely to get. And if we don't use it, we're gonna lose it." Look at me busting out all the tired old metaphors. Like I'd been saving them all winter just waiting for an opportunity to trot them out.”

“Modern families are complicated things. Siblings, half siblings, stepparents, stepcousins, what have you. You can't pick who you're born to, that's for sure.”