“Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn't. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.”

“For years after my father left us for Belladonna, I had looked for him... the last time someone had seen them, they were living on a duck's back.”

“If they projected the fact that they are dangerous any harder, there would be little puddles of "danger" on the floor around them. Look, it's "danger", don't step in it!”

“If I get on the elevator on the ground floor, the building has no basement, and someone says, Going up? I like to give them that blank road kill dead in the eyes look.”

“The neighborhood had gotten really into pastel the last few years. It started when Alfred's wife painted their whole house a soft pink during menopause. Looks Like Linen it was called. People raved. A magazine came, made the family hold up a rotisserie chicken, and then photographed it. A few months later, Mrs. Trenton's house was Mint Leaf. Ours became Celery Powder. The Resnicks' house turned Yellow Feather.”

“When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was.”