“...as if someone had thrown a hand grenade into the middle of a teddy bear orgy and the only survivors had had their fur blown off.”

“The hip-hop guy nodded curtly, like he knew that, and despite appearances to the contrary, he had not been trippin', but had, in fact, been chillin' like a mo-fuckin' villain, so step the fuck off, wigga. He crossed against the light, limping slightly under the weight of the subtext.”

“He, Jeff, and Troy Lee carried Super Soakers loaded with Grandma Lee's Vampire Cat Remedy, other Animals had garden sprayers slung on their backs, except for Gustavo, who thought that making him carry a garden sprayer was racial stereotyping. Gustavo had a flame thrower. He wouldn't say where he got it."Second Amendment, cabrones." (The guy who sold Gustavo his green card had included two amendments from the Bill of Rights and Gustavo had chosen Two and Four, the right to bear arms and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. [His sister Estrella had had seizures as a child. No bueno.] For five bucks extra he threw in the Third Amendment, which Gustavo bought because he was already sharing a three-bedroom house in Richmond with nineteen cousins and they didn't have any room to quarter soldiers.)”

“Tommy had completely forgotten that he was horny. He had always been horny, and had accepted that he always would be horny. So when Jody sat down across from him and the tsunami of hormones washed over him, he was quite shocked that he had ever forgotten.”

“Yo, yo, yo, check it out," said PJ, with enough hand gestures that any deaf person watching would have thought he had ASL Tourette's syndrome”

“'Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished.'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.'Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see.”

“Theophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum while sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play sixteen chords on the guitar and knew five Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a bar chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove Little Theater’s revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all of these endeavors, he had experienced a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artist’s soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create.”