“When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.”

“You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.”

“When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.”

“They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.”

“You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was, especially with women, submit, give in, maybe the guy will give you abreak and not kill you. Now, maybe you will get raped, butleast you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn'tjust lie down and take it. You don't know how many home-invasion scenes we walk in on where the people are sitting there all tied up and all dead. There'll be four, five people, a family, mayb...more "You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was, especially with women, submit, give in, maybe the guy will give you abreak and not kill you. Now, maybe you will get raped, butleast you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn'tjust lie down and take it. You don't know how many home-invasion scenes we walk in on where the people are sitting there all tied up and all dead. There'll be four, five people, a family, maybe some guests: enough to put up a fight. And you know they let themselves get tied up. You just know the guys said, 'We just want to tie you up. We won't hurt you.' You'd think the people would realize — why do they want to tie us up if they don't want to hurt us? But they bought it. It always gives us a little chuckle.”

“Kellis-Amberlee is a fact of existence. You live, you die, and then you come back to life, get up, and shamble around trying to eat your former friends and loved ones. That’s the way it is for everyone.”

“Rain spat at him, and he looked up, thinking that alone was the way to be, because alone meant you were in charge of what could get to you and what you could keep out.”