“Thought he had it all before they called his bluffFound out that his skin just wasn't thick enoughWanted to go back to how it was beforeThought he lost everythingThen he lost a whole lot more”

“Menyara's Creole accent was as thick as his mother's jar of refrigerated roux, and Nick loved the sound of it.He wasn't quite as pleased with his own. No matter how hard he tried to hide his accent, it always came out in certain words like "praline", "etouffee", "pecan", and any time he lost his temper. You could easily tell how mad he was by how Cajun he sounded. And if he started spewing all Cajun words, duck.”

“This wasn't the way he had expected his life to be. It worked, but that was about all. Happiness had got lost somewhere along the way.”

“For years, he said, his life had felt to him like a kind of experiment. The question being, How long could he hold out before the whole thing came crashing down on his head? He'd pictured himself looking back on the present day or week from his jail cell, or while contemplating the grass outside the asylum where surely he was headed. But rather than defeating him, these thoughts had actually fueled Wolf with determination. Fuck it, he'd think, if he had to go down, he sure as hell wasn't going without a fight.”

“Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.”

“These were his people--a strange thought. Maybe not his very own people, as in father, mother, brother, sister, but people just like him. He was lost but not so lost after all.”