“I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.”

“How can men be such lummoxes, such wads of chewing gum on our ballet slippers and still feel so good?”

“That may be so, but his faerie had suffered too much and he had had more than enough. If anybody so much as looked at her funny, he was going to come down hard on them with both size fourteen steel-toed boots. Then he would consider seriously the merits of evisceration.”

“She imagined Jack standing among the bins of nails and tool belts and the ranks of crowbars, unspoken to beyond the ordinary courtesies, seeming unaware of their awareness of him, watching flickering television in that cave full of the smells of leather and wood and oily metal, idle among all those implements of force and purpose, citified among the steel-toed boots and the work shirts. An odd place for a man to loiter who was so alive to embarrassment, so predisposed to sensing even the thought of rebuke.”

“Love is a violent recreational sport. Proceed at your own risk. Helmets, armor, and steel-toe boots are required by law.”

“Love is a violent recreational sport. Proceed at your own risk. Helmets, armor, and steel-toe boots are required by law.”