Quotes from Ross H. Spencer

But the human mind was a labyrinth with as many dead ends as thruways,

Mothers, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,

I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate." They didn't, but they played "Fidgety Feet," which Willow enjoyed very much,

She was watching me out of the corner of her eye. She put a hand to her white hair. I said hi toots you got a match? Hepzibah Dodd smiled a faded smile. She picked up her copy of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. By Adam Smith. She stood and grabbed my arm. She had a grip like a brand-new bear trap. Her voice was quavery. She said of course big boy. She said in my apartment.

They rumbled north on Glenwood Avenue, passing seedy taverns with soul music cascading through open doors. Peggy said, "Left at the next traffic signal—Falls Avenue." Following the turn they swung into a tight left-hand curve to plunge down a long, twisting hill. She said, "You're in Mill Creek Park now. Biggest city-limits park in the United States—Youngstown's Chamber of Commerce stresses that.

attempting to martial his thoughts.

Willow shook his head. If he'd picked her lock a few days earlier, if he'd peeked into her closet, he'd have known then, and four people would have lived.

At 6:45 on that cloudy and rapidly darkening evening, Lockington drove north on Clark Street. Wrigley Field loomed on his right and he stared glumly at the gaunt floodlight towers that were being erected on the grandstand roofs, far from operational now, but they'd be functioning in August. Night baseball in Wrigley Field—a sacrilege of unthinkable proportions, like a dice game smack dab in the middle of Vatican Square.

She's spry as a cricket and she knows exactly where the bear burped in the brickyard.

She took me into the living room. She dropped onto a huge white sofa. She locked her hands around her knees. She drew them up to her chest. She rocked back and forth slowly. That was all by God. I sat down. I had to. Candi said do you like my white blouse? I shrugged. I said it's fine as far as it goes.

He'd know exactly where the possum pooped in the petunia patch. Lockington

He's a graduate of Cornell University, he played basketball there—he's six-three, he weighs one-eighty, he lives in Wilmette, he's thirty-six, brown-eyed, balding, he has a habit of tugging at his left ear, he wears tinted spectacles, he's Missouri Synod Lutheran, he has two children, twelve and ten, Harry and Estelle, Estelle

The Gideon Bible was dog-eared. I opened it to its yellow silk marker and saw that Genesis 23:4 had been snipped out.

Rufe nodded. "Oh, sure, that's CIA style. Throw up a smoke screen—bumfoozle the opposition.

The most beautiful brunette on the face of Planet Earth stood very close to me. Her dark wavy hair cascaded to her shoulders. Her liquid brown eyes sparkled. Her full lips smiled a wonderfully warm smile. She said hello Purdue. I shrugged. I said hello Brandy.

said Chericola got a ball club that couldn't whip the Little Sisters of the Poor. I said if the entire town turned out for every game it couldn't support a hopscotch team. I said you're on some kind of religious bender and I'm stumbling around like a goddam zombie wondering what's going on.

Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight

He said the citizens worship a guy what massacred a dozen men and the cemetery owner ain't buried nobody in fifty years. I said okay where are we? Rube said son don't you get the drift? I shook my head. Rube leaned toward me. His voice was hoarse with horror. He said why boy we is in Hell!

blowing on her fingernails and buffing them on the front of her dress, a brief ritual from out of Willow's teens, indicating prowess.

He was dimly cognizant of his worsening situation, knowing that there had to be another road somewhere beyond his sexaholic jungle, and he blundered blindly through the tangled perplexities of his befuddled existence, seeking that new thoroughfare without sense of direction or the slightest idea of what it would look like if ever he managed to locate the damned thing.

My heart sounded like a washtub being beaten with a leg of mutton.

you show me a man what strikes while the iron is hot and I'll show you a man with a whole mess of third degree burns… Monroe D. Underwood

said maybe I will call myself Ross H. Spencer. I said he can't write either.

Lockington said, "'Use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think they shall be heard for their much speaking.'" She clapped her hands. "Oh, that's excellent! Who said it?" "My father—he used it twenty times a day." "It sounds almost biblical." "It is biblical—it's the only verse my old man ever memorized.