“We talk about how he and Leanne are doing knowing full well there is no sufficient answer.p 294”

“Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see what is before you, without the skew of context?p 342”

“I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants. There are mitigating factors—he is well-kempt, we are in a laundromat, and as a registered nurse, I have seen this sort of thing before—but they fail to completely dissipate the tension inherent in sharing close quarters with a pantless stranger.”

“In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups -- big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups -- so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.”

“It’s hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I’m pro-gun the same way I’m pro-potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won’t be waiting for yo at the top of the stairs with a potato fork.”

“If you had gone around the table last night ticking off the Ten Commandments and asking for a show of hands to indicate transgression, you would have thought we were doing the wave. A gloss of the New Testament rules and you would have heard the rotator cuffs snapping. But if you had asked a simpler question -- "Who among you is proud of this?" -- I think you would have seen no hands, and this is what I love about that crew. Chipped and profane, they have taught me that there is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache.”

“It (a singer's voice) sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand.”