The press conference was held in a courtroom at the new county courthouse, a space that did its best to translate justice into laminated wood.

Detective Virgil and Barlow {bomb-technician} arranged to meet at the Starbucks. Virgil got a grande hot chocolate, no-fat milk, no foam, no whipped cream, and Barlow got a venti latte with an extra...

Nuts don't come in bunches. Only grapes do.

Her Pan-Cake makeup was cracking like a dried-out Dakota lake bed.

Flowers said, I got two bottles of water in the car.Get them. And get your gun, Lucas said.The gun? You think?No. I just like to see you wearing the fuckin' gun for a change, Lucas said. C'mon, let's...

I once defenestrated a guy. The cops got all pissed off at me. I was drunk, but they said that was no excuse.Ah well, Virgil said. Then, The guy hurt bad?Cracked his hip. Landed on a Prius. Really...

So she made no secret about being gay?Why should she? the little old lady asked. Nobody would care but a bunch of stuffy old men.

If the AG had been a lightbulb instead of a lawyer, he would have been about a twenty-watt.

First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn't work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn't help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn't...

It's the way of the world, man. There are the worker bees, and the manager bees. The worker bees take care of the work, the manager bees take care of themselves.

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn't spoken to Virgil Flowers. He'd probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he'd done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in...

Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.

Oh yeah, I heard you got born again.' she said. 'Which you needed since they fucked up the first time.

I'm so horny the crack of dawn isn't safe.

He who is without sin among you should be the first to throw a stone at it, he said to me.

I didn't think, then, that we could ever be closer. I'm not sure anyone can. I'm not sure there is a place closer to someone than being at their side, awake, while they're asleep.

The anger I'd had, everything, was gone, and kissing her reminded me, again, that she was right. We were connected to each other. She was the air in my lungs, the blood in my veins; she was my whole...

The dissolution and sale of British Rail, transforming it into a disjointed network charging exorbitant prices for an unimproved and still taxpayer-subsidised service, darkened the joke a bit much for...

The Cookie Monster is anarchic, dynamic and madly driven by a very specific, but also totally random, aim: he wants cookies. He wants to charge around crazily smashing cookies into his mouth. He will...

.....it's hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters..... Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in...

In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows.

And if you'd swap your metalife for a bone clock's snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades!

I und'standed why Meronym'd not said the hole true 'bout Prescience Isle an' her tribe too. People b'lief the world is built so an' tellin 'em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours....

All minds pulse in a unique way, just as every lighthouse in the world has a unique signature. Some minds pulse consistently, some erratically. Some are lukewarm, some are hot. Some flare out, some...

Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks

Where there's bluster, thinks Luisa, there's duplicity

It's not lies or anything, just truths I made up.

Nothing often poses in men as wisdom. Spring

What else has changes since 1984? Oil's running our, I say Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinction of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era....

You ask a starved man," Gerritszoon says, "to drink to a glutton.