“Well it looks like the road to heavenBut it feels like the road to hellWhen I knew which side my bread was butteredI took the knife as wellPosing for another pictureEverybody's got to sellBut when you shake your assThey notice fastAnd some mistakes were built to last.”

“I'm the dumb kid from the West Side of Chicago who has no business being at a place like this. I've got one long, tough road ahead of me.”

“Only time will set you free, just like me”

“I thought I knew everything about friendship and family: the happiness, simplicity and joy within them. But there is another side of devotion, a side which Samira understands.”

“There were doors that looked like large keyholes, others that resembled the entrances to caves, there were golden doors, some were padded and some were studded with nails, some were paper-thin and others as thick as the doors of treasure houses; there was one that looked like a giant's mouth and another that had to be opened like a drawbridge, one that suggested a big ear and one that was made of gingerbread, one that was shaped like an oven door, and one that had to be unbuttoned.”

“Stupid cupid keeps on calling me, but I see nothing in his eyes. I miss my babe”

“It was like hundreds of roads he'd driven over - no different - a stretch of tar, lusterless, scaley, humping toward the center. On both sides were telephone poles, tilted this way and that, up a little, down...Billboards - down farther an increasing clutter of them. Some road signs. A tottering barn in a waste field, the Mail Pouch ad half weathered away. Other fields. A large wood - almost leafless now - the bare branches netting darkly against the sky. Then down, where the road curved away, a big white farmhouse, trees on the lawn, neat fences - and above it all, way up, a television aerial, struck by the sun, shooting out bars of glare like neon. ("Thompson")”