“Did the barrel aim so that eh eye could fire?”

“Truely was a Mississippi boy still. He didn't have a thing against religion, especially in the gentle hands of somebody like his daddy--or his mother either. But he wasn't too much persuaded when salvation was fired out of a double-barrel shotgun aimed point-blank at his skull.”

“I could see Eirene well enough to aim. SO I did. I aimed my weapon and thought of Bruno locked in a postcoital embrace with her. I embraced my jealousy. Then I pulled the trigger. - Celia Grave page 372”

“A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?”

“She had a voice so husky it could have pulled a dogsled, and the gun she was holding gave me a bad case of barrel envy.”

“It seemed hardly feasible that anyone could tune an oil barrel, and even less credible that the barrel could make music like nothing else in the world. She thought those sounds were magic.”