and the sad notes floated out to the patio and hung in the trees like birds too tired to fly

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection.

Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want

Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance.

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future.

No cop was ever born who wasn't a sucker for a finely-executed high-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges.