“Can I get to the bottle of Old Crow and mix it up with the remains of these ice fragments...a cool drink for the freak? Give the gentleman something cool, dear, can't you see he's wired his brain to the water pump and his ears to the generator...”

“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful.”

“You can do ice-breaking by being cool.”

“Sometimes looking at Frankie is like seeing Matt through a glass of water - a distorted composition of him with all the right parts, but mixed up and i the wrong order. As I watch her sing his old song, I can't shake the feeling that he just stopped by to say hello. ”

“How can you think it's cool when he calls you his bitch, but then get upset when he treats you like a dog?”

“What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, “I better move. I better get away from here.”But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.”