“Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.It is the smell of War.”

“The roses once grew there, and well their lives conceal; the ivy cobbled up their voices, and made me not to feel.”

“When writers come here they walk about smelling everything because New Orleans is, above all, a town where the heady scent of jasmine or sweet olive mingles with the cloying stink of sugar refineries and the musky mud smell of the Mississippi. It's an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked.”

“Gods of Olympus.” Piper stared at Leo. “What happened to you?”His hair was greased back. He had welding goggles on his forehead, a lipstick mark on his cheek, tattoos all over his arms, and a T-shirt that read HOT STUFF, BAD BOY, and TEAM LEO.“Long story,” he said.”

“Passion is not a reaction to an external event. It is the left over emotions from the internal battles you have won that propels you forward.”

“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked.Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.”