“That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.”

“The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.”

“What Vera doesn’t know is: I’d kill to be a pickle on her Big Mac—ground to relish between her perfect white teeth.I’d kill to be a bug she squishes with her holey Army-issue combat boot.But she’s too good for me. She always was.”

“You look pretty, as always," he said.Azalea grinned, deciding not to remind him that the last times he had seen her, she had been soaked, frozen, unconscious, and a torn mess of the undead.”

“Yeah, it's so popular it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways.”

“What was in it for me? I wasn't asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn't she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan.”