“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”

“You know how the bonds of family are, my lady… They cling as tightly as vines. And sometimes, like vines, they cling tightly enough to kill.”

“Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we're related for better or for worse… and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.”

“One of my girlfriends was getting married. This was becoming an annoying pattern.”

“This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.”

“The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.”

“It’s so messy bleeding like a pig.”

“Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty.”

“You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.”