“Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.”

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”

“At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye. Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe's castle surrounded by the Red Death. Hor...”

“There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was ...”

“The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of t...”

“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settle...”

“Every evil starts with 15 volts.”

“My feeling about work is that it's an unnecessary evil, so I've always done my best to avoid it.”

“Neither love nor evil conquers all, but evil cheats more.”

“I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).”

“The value is in the worth, not in the number.”

“There are many elements to a campaign. Leadership is number one. Everything else is number two.”