“During the night two porpoises came around the boat and he could hear them rolling and blowing. He could tell the difference between the blowing noise the male made and the sighing blow of the female.'They are good,' he said. 'They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish.”

“The telephone to Shadow's apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voiced too low to properly make out. He said, "hello?" and "who's there?" but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.”

“When Peter said he was romantic, it was in the way that I was romantic. A blow job and an “I love you” before rolling over and falling asleep.”

“... he knew that the cruelest of blows too often came with a smile.”

“I be dog if hit don't look like sometimes that when a fellow sets out to play a joke, hit ain't another fellow he's playing that joke on; hit's a kind of big power laying still somewhere in the dark that he sets out to prank with without knowing hit, and hit all depends on whether that ere power is in the notion to take a joke or not, whether or not hit blows up right in his face, like this one did in mine. ("A Bear Hunt")”

“If this were a made-up story, it would begin at night, with a storm blowing and owls hooting and rattling noises under the bed.”