"So they let the pythons go, and a lot of them ended up in the Everglades, which is basically Las Vegas for pythons. They've been engaging in wild python sex out there for years; wildlife biologists estimate that there are now more than one hundred thousand of them. They can grow to be longer than twenty feet, and they don't have any natural enemies, so they're eating all the other Everglades animals. The wildlife authorities are desperately trying to figure out what to do about this. My preference would be to use tactical nuclear weapons, but this would never fly with the wildlife community, which regards the Everglades as a precious ecosystem, even though to the naked civilian eye it is a giant festering stinkhole of muck."

“If Man A asks Man B for directions, Man B, realizing that Man A is a weak, direction-asking type of male who probably also reads owner's manuals, could decide to attack Man A's village and plunder his women. Man A is not about to run that type of risk.”

“Guess who got punished for this. Do you think it was the grown-ups, who let the Russians get ahead? Of course not. It was the same group that had to get the polio shots: us kids. All kinds of experts came crawling out of the academic woodwork to declare that Americans were science and math morons, frittering away our brainpower playing Davy Crockett while Russian children were learning about the cosine. And so I remember 1957 as the year when school became less fun. From that point on, we spent a lot less time making authentic medieval castles out of papier-mâché, and a lot more time learning about the ionosphere. I suppose this change also had to do with the fact that we were getting older, but at the time I viewed it as yet another reason to hate the Russians.”

“Once, when the bar was slow, he told her about things he'd found in his clients' pools. Alligators, for example; he'd encountered at least a dozen. Also the occasional snake. Hundreds of frogs. These were to be expected in South Florida, which as far as the native wildlife was concerned was still a swamp, no matter how many houses got built on it.”

“Other nations are not allowed to mess around with the internal affairs of nations in this hemisphere.”

“Winter's here, and you feel lousy: You're coughing and sneezing; your muscles ache; your nose is an active mucus volcano. These symptoms -- so familiar at this time of year -- can mean only one thing: Tiny fanged snails are eating your brain.”

“In the case of the Extravaganza of the Seas, the owner of record was a man named Bobby Kemp, who was usually described in the newspaper as a millionaire entrepreneur. Kemp liked the look of that, entrepreneur, although he personally could not pronounce it.”