“Dr. Rollins carried more envy around inside his rib cage than you could find at a drag show in San Francisco. And on this occasion, as Jake walked into Tom’s office, you didn’t need to be spiritually sensitive to notice it. You could set your iPhone out on the desk, and it would charge all by itself.”
The Importance of Prepositions
“They were both stellar students in a stellar theological program (if you don’t count all the unbelief and apostasy), but there were striking differences between the two men. A first-rate education had done into Dr. Tom’s head, while it had apparently gone straight to Dr. Jake’s.”
Make That a Stick of Warm Butter
“In short, they were not prepared at all for battle. The wedge of young radicals went through the middle of the crowd like a meat cleaver going sideways through a stick of butter”
Quick Ignorance
“But let us just remember what Mark Twain said about how a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on his shoes. The Internet has not changed this or made us smarter. It just moves our ignorance around the world at very high rates of speed.”
With No Shade Available
“Martin Malloy was right about the impact that his story would have. The flag story was already hot, and this took the whole thing up to a high summer afternoon on Mercury’s bright side, that being the side closest to the sun.”
Taking Its Sweet Time
“The remaining twenty minutes crawled by like rapidly cooling magma.”
Clueless
“The next morning, while brushing her perfect white teeth, the truth revealed by her manifest and palpable relief over the whole thing came crashing in on her, and so she sat down and acknowledged to herself what was in fact the case. She was a goner. And he was clueless. High-minded. An office full of thick books. Accreditation visits. Scholarly articles. All of that. Stupid man. Dear stupid, stupid man.”
An Actual Handicap
“For Maria was a beauty. And she had decided some years before that there was quite possibly an inverse relationship between feminine beauty and feminine happiness. When she first came to Choctaw Valley, it had taken her almost a year to make any friends at all. Most of the boys were terrified of her, and those who weren’t scared of her were terrified of what the other girls would do if they even talked to her. And needless to say, the girls were usually pretty sullen around her, although in a sweet southern way. All they ever wanted to do whenever they were with her was go to the restroom to check their makeup.”
Admittedly . . .
“Maria Barancho had been a fixture at Choctaw Valley for some years now, but she was an odd-out sort of fixture. She was a black-haired, brown-eyed Italian in the midst of a bunch of pale Celts who, for some reason, liked to think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons. This is like a German confusing himself with a Frenchman, but the history is admittedly complicated.”
An Acquired Taste
“He was a sturdy young man—a fellow that people usually considered good looking, eventually and somewhat reluctantly, after they had gotten over their first shock. Trevor was an acquired taste.”