I imagine the center of the Earth must be a crowded place by now, but perhaps it is the spirits of those of us residing there that keep the Earth alive and green.

From the end of the bar, the bartender threw a sidelong look at him, so Clarence pulled out a broken Bluetooth headset and fixed it to his ear. "I learned this trick while traveling with Mikey," Clarence told Nick. "Makes my brand of crazy the same as everyone else's.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

On a hairpin turn, above the dead forest, on no day in particular, a white Toyota crashed into a black Mercedes, for a moment blending into a blur of gray.

I'm tired of eating your family's lousy, tasteless recipes," Dad said. "Tasteless recipes? My grandmother's rolling in her grave!" "It's from indigestion.

Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true?

Should I push him or should I throw him?" Howie asks. "Do what comes naturally," I yelled back. "I don't know," he says. "This is a very unnatural thing.