“These babies aint just guitars; these babies are living, breathing instruments.”

“When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.”

“Theres secrets hiding inside this six-string just waitin for somebody to find em and turn em into music.”

“As he farmed, hard labor left his hands callused, the sun bleached his hair, his face leathered, and his heart throbbed with music.”

“STAINSWith red clay between my toes,and the sun setting over my head,the ghost of my mother blows in,riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,riding on a honeysuckle breeze.Her teeth, the keys of a ...”

“A song rises up from the belly of my pastand rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.”

“We scarified a mosquito. I bet that's what did it. It was probably a virgin too.”

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

“I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is pos...”

“But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, ...”

“Nico knew something about ghosts. Letting them get inside your head was dangerous. He wanted to help Reyna, but since his own strategy was to deal with his problems alone, spurning anyone who tried...”

“It was all real and blazing with detail. But I was shadow, light as mist, mute as the wallpaper.”