"When I go on to wherever I’m going, I’m gonna look over you every day. If what I’m thinking is a prayer, maybe God will grant the only thing I can think of to ask for. Thanks for bein’ the greatest momma ever was. I sure don’t know why you loved me as much as you did, momma, or what you saw in me, but you did everything right.         This is my little opinion."

"Pack couldn’t go home at the conclusion of his shift at the Cunningham Aircraft plant and relax. He wasn’t Chester A. Riley. He was a sheepdog protecting his herd from wolves like Rick Jason. For Simon Pack, there could be no long recovery time. Wolves were on the prowl, and without his vigilance, and those like him, his herd would disappear. He would not permit his America to perish in the flames of hatred. Back to work tomorrow."

"Tetu stood his seven feet straight as a yardstick. His chin tilted upward. He was unable to mouth the words to the hymns. This struggle to hold back a torrent of tears consumed him. Yet he found the joyful noise soothing. What he was thinking in those minutes was, “Let this go on forever. Bang the death drum slowly. Bugler, play Taps for an eternity. I do not want the time to come when I’ll have to commit the bodies of these three people I have so loved to a cold place beneath the soil.”  "

"Tetu was publicly keeping it together, but in his private moments he suffered from a profound spiritual dryness. And this terrible pain wouldn’t pass tomorrow or the next day, either. The thought flitted through Pack’s mind that the man with the Brobdingnagian heart, literally and figuratively, if he were honest with God, was thinking of his Creator as the Abominator. Why have you struck my family down like this, Abominator?"

"Frontman looked hit man in the eye as he filled two clear water glasses with the foul hairy mucous. Frontman toasted hit man, held his glass high, and—with the sound system’s re-verb functioning—said, “Rat brew, bro! Bottoms up, m-----f-----r!"