“Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn't spoken to Virgil Flowers. He'd probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he'd done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas's humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he'd find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he'd be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.”

“Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers]Dark of the Moon, p.7”

“And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he'd at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers”

“I once defenestrated a guy. The cops got all pissed off at me. I was drunk, but they said that was no excuse.""Ah well," Virgil said. Then, "The guy hurt bad?""Cracked his hip. Landed on a Prius. Really fucked up the Prius, too.""I can tell you, just now is the only time in my life I ever heard 'defenestration' used in a sentence," Virgil said."It's a word you learn after you done it," Morton said. "Yup. The New Prague AmericInn, 2009."Virgil was amazed. "Really? The defenstration of New Prague?”

“He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in.”

“In every letter, in every line, she saw him. He hadn't changed - he'd only grown into the man he'd meant to be.”

“He knew that when he'd let Cheyenne lead him away, he'd lost his chance to find out the name of the girl who, without a single word spoken to him, had stolen his heart.”