There was no one color that could paint Lena Duchannes. She was a red sweater and a blue sky, a gray wind and a silver sparrow, a black curl escaping from behind her ear.

When you look up. Do you see the blue sky of what might be? Or the darkness of what will never be? Do you see me?

I suppose I am a snob. I loathe towns. I loathe townspeople. They have small minds and giant backsides. Which is to say, what they lack in interiors they make up in posteriors.

I would love to say how nice it is to see you again, but that would be a lie. And I am nothing if not honest.

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

These are the kinds of things a guy thinks about when he visits his own grave.

Macon, wet from the raindrops for the first time.