“His spirit is like a guttering candle”

“Even I would be moved by his kindness at times, but he could, just as easily, be malicious and cruel. He was both a spirit of amazing loftiness and an irredeemable man of the gutter. He could charge forward, the optimistic leader, even as his heart writhed in a swamp of loneliness. He lived in his own special hell.”

“It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantuan preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies.”

“Would you say the shapeshifter was in distress?”“Hell yeah, he was in distress. His tail was on fire.”“He ran like his tail was on fire?”“No, his tail was on fire. Like a big, furry candle on his ass.”

“These are people who accept the fire of the Holy Spirit,' he said, 'the fire that is left behind but that is used by so few people to light their candles.”

“The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.”