I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway. - Jim Thompson

You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.

What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?

She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.