“All was still: dark crawlers with their frozen treads, bulldozers motionless as boulders, backhoes with bent necks and sleeping hearts and shove-mouth jaws pillowed on gravel. And tractors. An antique Case Model DEX in signature flambeau red, last year's twenty-foot-tall New Holland TV140 gleaming like a groomed thoroughbred, Minneapolis-Molines and John Deeres and Steigers and Fords and still, among them all, nothing quite like the Deutz.”

“The Mahdi rolls along the path to the race track as red, broad and shining as a John Deere tractor....”

“[Veda:] Twenty years of thinking that vampires and witches and all things supernatural were nothing but a bedtime story: a myth, thought up by ignorant people and told to children to keep them from straying after dark. Now, when it was right in front of her, it still felt like a fairy tale.”

“THE OWLSby: Charles BaudelaireUNDER the overhanging yews,The dark owls sit in solemn state,Like stranger gods; by twos and twosTheir red eyes gleam. They meditate. Motionless thus they sit and dreamUntil that melancholy hourWhen, with the sun's last fading gleam,The nightly shades assume their power. From their still attitude the wiseWill learn with terror to despiseAll tumult, movement, and unrest; For he who follows every shade,Carries the memory in his breast,Of each unhappy journey made.'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.”

“But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don't remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women - and that's fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.”

“Gently, I reach forward and close her eyes with my fingertips, hoping it will make her seem merely asleep. But the stillness of sleep is nothing at all like the stillness of death.”