“Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.”

“That water's colder'n hell!"That's what makes it good. That's what makes it help all your bruises'n bumps'n stuff."It's colder'n a goddam witch's tit in there!”

“..boys by civil calculations, we had by now roughed up the swami and slept where the elephant shits, Shocking us would have required some kind of genius.Woe To Live On”

“Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.”

“Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.”

“Nobody here wants to be awful," he said. He hopped a little as he zipped up. "It's just nobody here knows all the rules yet, and that makes a rocky time.”

“Her right hand held a bottle of Pepsi that she'd clogged with peanuts and called a late lunch.”