She looked more like she used to than she used to, if that makes sense.

And I felt so marvelously clean and soaped and so in tune with the whole damned universe that I had the feeling I could have clouded up and rained and lightninged myself, and blown that cheese-colored room to smithereens.

“You ever shoot one of these, baby?” “No,” she said, “but it must be just like pointing your finger.” “That’s right, they say that’s why in the newspaper when you read about a housewife shooting her man, he generally stays shot. Women don’t complicate shooting with a lot of stylized foolishness. The average housewife has had plenty of practice

If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed, or a bad breakfast that causes the doctor to sew the absorbent cotton inside you. From a slick tire tread or the hiccups or from kissing the wrong woman. Life is a rental

I couldn’t help thinking of Benson, the cockeyed driller down on the Atchafayala, who said some day I’d work my way up to derrick man. He and Brannigan came out of the same pod. Both had the terrible conceit of little men who through fortune or persistence had landed in positions where there were even littler men for them to boss around. I’m sure

weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and ninety-eight, and I don’t guess she’d’ve weighed in at more than a hundred and eighteen if the girdle had been loaded with silver dollars. But trying to strip the thing off her was like trying to skin a baby python with a sledge hammer for a head.

We wore the long-billed silly-looking caps of straw Virginia had bought for us so we’d look like tourists. She said if we were going to look like tourists we might as well get accustomed to looking silly, because that was the biggest part of it, a kind of over-all silliness. I thought that was pretty smart. And I still do.

She kissed the way an expert dancer follows the lead, giving and taking at exquisitely the right moment, and getting across the idea that she had a lot in reserve and this was only a sample. I’m not lying when I say I think that kiss lasted a quarter hour. But I still planned to leave her in the ladies john of some filling station. Because you

“Does it ever bother you a lot, darling, that I am what I am?” “No.” I kissed her on the nose and it was cold and innocent as a button. “Honestly, Tim?” “No, the only time you bother me is when you’re not what you are.” “That’s a lovely thing to say.” “I’m not trying to be lovely. I’m telling you what I think.”