Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up.

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.