She’s dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

The world was filling up with people, it seemed to him, who pulled their punches everywhere they went in life. Light beer, decaf coffee, low-sodium seltzer.

Walter Jelinek was a man, but he looked like a car, the kind of old junker car that had been in some bad accidents so that now the frame is bent, the wheels don’t line up any more, the whole vehicle sags to one side and pulls to that side, and the brakes are oatmeal.

What was the sense of talking about a problem if you didn’t have a way to solve it?

Hemingway’s judgment on people, that the competent guy does it on his own and the incompetents lean on each other.” In.

Please... they’ll kill me. I’ll kill you... worry about me.

The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree”.

Nobody but Parker can irritate people so quick.” Jacko.

He beat out a drumroll on the table edge with the first two fingers of each hand.

People get used to everything but being dead.