At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head.

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

The calm and the sorrow were so great that they bore down on his chest, and the loneliness was complete, a circle impenetrable.

In a house where the littlest statement automatically marshalled crushing forces of argument against itself, she had learned to be silent.

He's eating God the way a bear eats meat against the winter.

He felt a desire to open his body for her inspection, so that she could see all the hidden things in him, even the things he did not know were there.

Those thoughts she had kept weak and pale and hidden in the recesses of her brain, just out of thinking vision, came out into the open, and she saw that they were not foul and loathesome like slugs, as she had always believed, but somehow light and gay and holy.