I bet you cook good, huh?" Darlene asked. "Mother doesn't cook," Ignatius said dogmatically. "She burns.

The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.

you can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.

The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.

Psycho? The woman's senile. We had to stop at about thirty gas stations on the way over here. Finally I got tired of getting out of the car and showing her which was the Men's and which was the Women's, so I let her pick them herself. I worked out a system. The law of averages. I laid money on her and she came out about fifty-fifty.

You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.

Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel,' Ignatius belched, 'Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.