“Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!”

“How could I compete with that? Candies and toys! I had string and glue and some very complicated dynamics going on at my station. I mean, when I was assigned to that table, no one happened to mention that it was a simmering hotbed of political unrest concerning the lower case r. A wicked web indeed.”

“Okay, okay,' I said to my husband as he picked up a food dehydrator off the table and shot me a look. 'Maybe I did get carried away. Maybe the world won't end in a year, maybe it won't end until 2028, when the Aztec calendar stops.''The Bugles will be very old by then,' my husband said. 'They will have lost their snappy crunch.''They weren't to eat,' I said. 'They were to put on our fingers and poke the eyes out of looters.”

“I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?”

“It's a proclamation he regards as complete absolution from answering...as if his last name was Bush, he was eighteen, and there was a draft going on.”

“As soon as Nicholas was born, my mother swore she'd rather see her daughters become Jehovah's Witnesses or pole dancers before she saw her first grandchild in daycare when my sister went back to work. I don't think it was originally the idea of daycare that didn't sit well with her but the fact that there, in a bassinet, was a fresh slate, a lump of clay that could be worked on and molded into the perfect child who had eluded her the first time around with her own daughters.”

“...Is it just another pore expanding? God, I already have pores the size of pudding cups, that's the last thing I need, another pore...to fill in with spackle.”