Rita folded her arms around herself and peered up at me. “If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said you were hitting the bottle too hard. But then I got stabbed and should have died, but instead a bunch of cops and ambulance people showed up because somebody who wasn’t even there sent them on ahead to save my life. If something like that happens to someone like me, you start to have a little faith in something bigger. I don’t know if I believe in magic or miracles all the time. But I believe in you, Detective Walker. I believe in you.

Don’t be sorry. Be good. Be right. Be a hero.

I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren't especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can't make it easy to dig through. So even if you're a very angry and determined zombie, you've kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave.

They're constants, aren't they?" ... "Books are. That's why we like them so much. They seem immutable. They're not, of course. Not from the author's first draft to the tenth printing, but they seem like it.

She hissed, right there behind my ear, and I had the horrible idea she was spitting maggots into my hair. Why maggots were a problem when I was about to be dead, I didn’t know, but the idea completely grossed me out. “In the womb I heard you die, for no one lives when a banshee cries.” I wasn’t just going to die. I was going to be rhymed to death. That simply wasn’t fair.

Thank God genuine video phones hadn't been invented. I hadn't even grabbed a towel. Ford Prefect would despair of me.

She had a body that even I coveted in a strictly Platonic sense.