"She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight."

“It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls freakish.”

“'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.”

“Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum.”

“And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.”

“I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest.”

“The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, and drink it very slowly.”