“Ornate language tended to unsettle him. Passages from nineteenth-century novels might glow like hot coals or squirm like heaps of snakes. In fact, he tried not to read anything written before the First World War. Hemingway made a good cutoff point. Hemingway's sentences were a nice deep blue, and they mostly held still, like stalks of wheat on a windless day.(p18)”

“I almost let it go. I think it was the yellow dress. It made me want to give her the benefit of the doubt. What can you say about a woman who wears a yellow dress to break into an office at night? How bad can her intentions be?Still, I was reasonably certain she wasn't telling the truth. Not that it bothered me. Not really. I watched her sitting there, bent slightly forward, the palm of her right hand open in her lap, her left hand rubbing her shoulder. Lips curled in a smile. Innocent eyes looking back at me. It was like being lied to by a basket of kittens.(p134)”

“Come on," I said. "You think you're going to ask the wrong question and--what?--the Spencers are going to make you disappear?""I can't rule it out," she said."Actually, I think you can.""We'll see. I'll call you after, let you know how it goes. If you don't hear from me, well, you do what you think is right. If I disappear, maybe you can find me."Her voice had turned careless and light, but I thought I could still hear an undertone of gravity in it."If you can't find me," she said, "I wouldn't mind being avenged.(p159)”

“Life is like a library owned by the author.In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.”

“She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.”

“Nothing was like knowing you were the appetizer for a feast of orgy, that you were what whetted the guests and enticed them to devour.”

“In porn, men give blow jobs like they love men. Women give blow jobs like they love the camera.”