“Don’t underrate ordinary human decency,” Josh said quietly. “There’s more of heaven in a guy who hands a cold soda to a hot, tired panhandler than there is in fifty moral philosophers.”

“Future Farmers of America. Group who take ag classes and are going to inherit the farm. Hot shit around here, they have a couple guys in every clique, and they stick together, 'cause they know they'll be seeing each other every week for the next sixty years.”

“Newt Gingrich, Reagan reflected, had never in his life fit properly into a suit. He still looked like the fat, despised, teacher’s-pet, suck-up junior debating whiz who was going to fall apart in his senior year, except he was now fifty years past it. Back when I was alive, he had that same querulous expression of a guy who didn’t understand two big things:
1. being smart doesn’t make you popular, and2. even if it did, he isn’t smart enough for it to work for him.He remembered trying to explain it to Nancy, who had told him that, “Ronnie, granted that Newt is sometimes irritating, you have to admit he’s brighter than most Congressmen—”“So is every horse out at Rancho del Cielo, Mommy, and half the rocks for that matter,” he’d said.”

“I gave up drinking, and the next time I saw Bonny at a party, she was mad at me about that too, and went off and made out all night with Chip Neminech, the tackle who demonstrated that not only is there no I in team, there’s no Q, either. I suppose, given that my mother was a girl, I shouldn’t have been surprised that some of them could get pretty weird.”

“Where did you find construction guys swapping dirty jokes in proto-Númenorean?” Aura asked.“On construction sites. Is that coffee ready?”

“I guess when life hands you lemons, chop 'em up and get lemonade; when life hands you cats, chop 'em up and get pussy.”

“... they only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn’t understand tractor pulls, either.”