"Greg Adkins"

“The jazz band stopped dead. The clock’s chimes launched into the lament of the Westminster bells. A terrible silence hovered. “Ha!” said Hildesheim. “Ha!” said Bobby Moos. Right then the band sensed death.”
― Jean Ray, Whiskey Tales

“Carney was flattered that the Italian thought he had the scratch to buy the two buildings, that the white side of town recognized his successes, then quickly assumed something was wrong and Bongiovanni was dumping bum properties on him. The city itching to condemn, some expensive disaster in the sewer below, or the final version of the Curse of 125th and Morningside finally come due. None of that turned out to be true, although Mrs. Hernandez in apartment 3R of 381 had a mysterious stain in her bathroom wall that returned each time it was patched and repainted and which bore an eerie resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower, a curse if ever he heard one. “He stares at me,” she said.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“Oh, ‘philosophy.’ You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“Exterminators refer to old rats as Moby Dicks. “Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,” one exterminator says. “A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skillfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read. If you get a few Moby Dicks in your house, there are just two things you can do: you can wait for them to die, or you can burn your house down and start all over again.”
― David Brendel, An Editor’s Burial: Journals and Journalism from the New Yorker and Other Magazines