I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.'

I pulled the rearview down and looked at myself in the mirror for a spell, trying to spot virtues.

You know, I’m very near to bein’ normal, but I just can’t get over the hump.

This floor, here? I remember when this floor here used to get to jumping’ like a fuckin’ bunny from all the dancing’. Everybody dancing’ around all night, stoned out of their minds – and it always was the happy kind of stoned back then.

Can’t none of this be new to you.

Ledoux’s face was pebbled with mosquito bites. Forget the Cutter’s and that means every needle-nose bug in the woods spare-changing you for blood like cornerboy hustlers spotting a strung-out Kennedy trying to score on Seventh. Like you got plenty to give.

I sat there trying to avoid certain thoughts – the kind that’ll chew the meat clean out of your head if you open their cage.

Ree followed a path made by prey uphill through scrub, across a bald knob and downhill into a section of pine trees and pine scent and that pious shade and silence pines create. Pine trees in low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

Bauer was a large, flat-topped man, with pale skin that had been acned and pitted so that it resembled a cob cleaned of corn, eyes the color of snuff, and the general expression of a natural-born straw boss.

You wake up in this here world, my sweet li’l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin’ and you stay tough ‘til lights out – have you learned that?