“Miss Kwan said, putting her voice into its “kindly” mode, which was only slightly less scary than full-on shouting.”

“sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.”

“No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear.”

“[It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking oneself seriously slightly less crude than others. 97”

“In the picture, Ava Gardner's tousled black hair obscured her right eye, and her full, closed lips were pulled slightly to the right, resulting in something less than a smile. They looked as if they'd been smeared shut with red paint, though the photo was in black and white. It wasn't so much a fuck-me face as a I've-been-there-and-back look, the kind of expression you see only on the most expensive whores.”

“the beauty of nature appears only as a reflectin of the beauty,that belongs to spirit, as an imperfect incomplete mode [of beauty],a mode which in its substance is contained in the spirit itself"*hegel”