“In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.”

“An idea so luminous flashed across her brain that she almost thought the room had leaped into light.”

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

“The image of a well-dressed older woman making on a goopish spoonful of artificial boon spooge was running across the lobes of his brain like a stuttering nightmare.”

“Every forty-three blinks, the flashing lights on the police cars that follow my van into Houston synchronize. They flash separately for a few turns, then start flashing in series, like leading-in lights. Then, for a second, they all flash at once. What I learn as I’m driving into Houston under the low, still clouds, and choppers, for the first day of my trial, is that life works the same way. Most of the time you feel the potential for synchrony, but only once in a while do things actually synch up.”

“But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tneded to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would rather not have in his head.”