“[Preston] Hotchkis had earned his position by representing San Marino, a tiny, rich, Anglo municipality south of Pasadena that had been tellingly named after a European micro-kingdom.”

“Industry, the "enigmatic municipality, [that] sprawls across the map of the San Gabriel Valley like an underfed dragon”

“A descendent of Basque ranchers, the mayor came from the small circle of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants who had been his father's oldest customers and friends. Perhaps Malburg told Jim the story of how Vernon got its start in 1905, when John Baptiste Leonis, a French Basque hog rancher, persuaded the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads to extend tracks to his city to attract new factories, their preferred freight-hauling customers.”

“It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.”

“His life had been disrupted, but not his billing cycles.”

“He held his hat in his hand; there was no disorder in his clothing; his coat was carefully buttoned: he was very pale, and he trembled slightly; his hair, which had still been gray on his arrival in Arras, was now entirely white: it had turned white during the hour he had sat there.”

“He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.”