“She’d passed sentence on God two years ago, and she fed her doubts of Him daily, taking care they didn’t shrivel and die.”

“Her gun was twenty seconds away, her friends three minutes, and the police five minutes. Her choice was obvious.”

“It's a bitch on this ship, isn't it?' That got an unexpected smile out of the symp. Musey had two dimples on his cheeks that made him look about half his chronological age.”

“Talking of the local Sheriff, Jake Valentine, tall and skinny and his wife Myra, "She was a short woman, maybe five feet tall in her socks, the top of her head not quite reaching Jake's chest. What she lacked in height she made up for in girth. Jeffrey guessed she was at least a hundred pounds overweight. Standing side by side, the Valentines looked like the living embodiment of the number ten.”

“Considering what Pauline's been through . . ." Will began, then stopped himself. "She's not very nice.""She's a cold-blooded bitch.""I'm surprised I haven't fallen in love with her.”

“She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.”

“Mostly because I’ve realized what a lame teenager I was. I was always home at the stroke of midnight; I didn’t like drinking mash; I didn’t have sex. I read books and had an inferiority complex because I was afraid to do all that other stuff. I don’t know anything about being a badass punk rocker.”