“Even thinking was hard.”

“I used to be a Catholic, and when I first started police work, I worried about that. I saw a lot of people dead or dying for no apparent reason . . . not people I killed, just people. Little kids who'd drowned, people dying in auto accidents and with heart attacks and strokes. I saw a lineman burn to death, up on a pole, little bits and pieces, and nobody could help . . . . I watched them go, screaming and crying and sometimes just lying there with their tongues stuck out, heaving, with all the screaming and hollering from friends and relatives . . . and I never saw anyone looking beyond. I think, Michael, I think they just blink out. That's all. I think they go where the words on a computer screen go, when you turn it off. One minute they exist, maybe they're even profound, maybe the result of a great deal of work. The next . . . . Whiff. Gone.”

“First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn’t work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn’t help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn’t work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she’s still drinking.”

“Does Raggedy Ann have a cotton crotch?”

“Got here half an hour ago and had a look, eyeballin' it," Sawyer said. "It's murder, all right. Tell you something else - the sun went down, and it's as dark as the inside of a horses's ass out here.""You're sure?""Well, I've never actually been inside a horses's ass.”

“Does a chicken have lips?”

“Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.”