If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it. If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil. If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape. If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions. All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not. May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them. May you find perfection, and know it by name.

One of them hissed-not the hiss of a cat, a long, steady tone-more like the hiss of air escaping the rubber raft that is all that lies between you and a dark sea full of sharks, the hiss of your life leaking out at the seams.

Which is why you chose to wear that delightful ensemble from the skank-wear collection at Hoes-n-Thangs?" -Tommy

Charlie Asher: Mrs. Ling, is that duck wearing trousers? Mrs. Ling: Could be . . . . You hear of paper-wrap chicken? This duck in pants.

The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.

Nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.