“He spun around. She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs.”

“How big are souls anyway?" asked Coraline.The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned against the back wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes.”

“It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés. And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall any day.”

“Some of us are so sharp," he [Mr. Vandemar] said as he leaned in closer to Richard, went up on tiptoes into Richard's face, "we could just cut ourselves.”

“Laura made a great chili. She used lean meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice and a pitch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot. He had even written down the recipe, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Laura's chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay-it was certainly edible, but it had not been Laura's chili.”

“He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.”

“It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.”