“skin-that smooth plump sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion”

“Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.”

“He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.”

“They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet....”

“The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.”

“and it’s all kind of moving and sweet except that you’re not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking,”

“It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”