“She had wailed loudly enough to wake the dead and make them call the cops.”

“They killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones — the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her — kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.”

“That was it, then, civilization was officially collapsed if the cops had stopped ticketing abandoned cars and roosted on them instead.”

“Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.”

“How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.”

“Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”

“Perhaps the wind
Wails so in winter for the summers dead,
And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries
For what has been and is not.”

“Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead.”

“You had to know someone very well to make them laugh like that. She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did not know him at all?”

“The Lord will always send a people wake-up calls. And he has been sending us wake-up call, after wake-up call, after a wake-up call. … He has been sending us wake-up calls, and you can send two kinds of wake-up calls. One through fear, like 9/11. 9/11 woke us up, and we stood shoulder-to-shoulder for a very short period of time.”