“She sounds the way bananas taste.”

“Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.”

“She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.”

“And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty - a prettiness marred by her seeing to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain.”

“She would not admit she was making a mess. Unfazed by bacon already shriveled and coffee stone-cold, she poured her mixings onto a grill she'd forgotten to grease, and said, "Oh I adore to cook: it makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.”

“In the eyelid-blue betweenness the wordy sounds of the whiskey-drinkers spilled distantly.”

“our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.”