“The sermon began mysteriously to meander, and though many good things were still said, they all seemed like pearls rolling around on a table without any thread to make them into a necklace.”
The Man in the Dark, p. 3
Truly Centered, In Other Words
“He admired his abilities and cheerfulness, and yet he was put off somewhat by Trevor’s moral center apparently having nothing whatever to do with any procedure manuals.”
Standing Straight in the Corner
“He had gotten the internship because of the pull his grandmother had, and her convictions and demeanor were of a similar nature to his. If she had been a piano, she would have been a nineteenth-century upright.”
Like They Were Legos
“When enough of a staff assembled to constitute a quorum for getting yelled at, in the presence of his secretary Susan, Parker Parkson, and two interns, he dumped out two buckets of cuss words onto the carpet, and then spent a good ten minutes kicking them around the room with his cowboy boots.”
In Order to Say Hi
“The sun had barely gotten one elbow on the edge of the world that constituted the top of his garden wall.”
Which Can Be Pretty Aggrieved
“Prater, filled with the kind of aggrieved righteousness that you usually see in a cat that has been hosed down by a ten-year-old boy, had decided that it was time to act.”
Somebody Has to Do It
“A friend of Trevor’s from the gym downtown was a cop with the reserves, and, of course, if it comes to that, why shouldn’t he have been?”
Trimmers
“These were people who just hated being led by trimmers and compromisers, and whose leaders always trimmed and compromised because that is what they thought the people were demanding. They had been let down time and over again by countless leaders who either drifted off into neo-evangelical liberalism like a child’s lost carnival balloon, or who blew up in the old-school conservative fashion via sexual scandals.”
Or One Ten Pound Plate
“Tom showed him to the door, said good night with little or no enthusiasm, and when the door was closed, sat down on the bench by the door. He felt as though he had just eaten a couple of the five-pound plates from his weight-lifting gear in the basement.”
That Kind of Presbyterian
“‘Is he a believer?’ Dawn asked. ‘Well, he is a Presbyterian. But he is the kind that believes the Bible. And as an attorney, I get the impression he is the kind of lawyer who goes home and sharpens his incisors at night.’”