"Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall."

“How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?”

“The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.”

“Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art.”

“I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.”

“Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.”

“It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.”