Bob

“Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“It had been a long while since I’d watched any television, and things had only gotten weirder. Beauty pageants for infants; ruddy men in trucker caps fighting over abandoned storage lockers; public shamings of compulsive hoarders and pre-diabetics; affluent suburban women made up like transvestite hookers, competing with each other in feats of coarseness and cruelty; barely literate pregnant teens with tattoos, unfocused eyes, and futures like wrecked cars; apoplectic crypto-fascists spitting bile and paranoia; a carnival midway of weight loss devices, hair growth creams, erectile dysfunction potions, and pottery from which herbs grew like green hair. It was like the day room of a surrealist mental hospital, or any big city ER on a summer Saturday night.”
― Peter Spiegelman, Dr. Knox

“A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time.”
― Adrian McKinty, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly

“The only difference was, you could play the music again and again; a life plays only once.”
― Peter Robinson, Before the Poison