“He was about sixty, but his time in the Alaskan oil fields had made him seem about ten years older than that. ‘Thank you so much,’ he said, as he went through. His voice sounded like loose gravel being stirred with a stick.”
Though It Didn’t
“So he tried his first line again. ‘Christ is the Lord of the nations in a spiritual sense,’ he said. A number of pony tails in the front rows bobbed because they saw that this was intended to make sense.”
Not Friendly at All
“He felt like a quarterback who had just been ear-holed by a linebacker with poor manners and a bad attitude.”
Or Grass Grow
“The apostle Paul lived one of the most thrilling lives ever lived, and yet the good professor seemed to have the ability to present the second missionary journey as something at the same level as watching paint dry.”
The Butterfly’s Nicest Pair
“He had once heard his grandfather say, in reference to his grandmother, that she was the butterfly’s boots, and this was a sentiment that Trevor now thought he understood the deeper meaning of. He had fallen for her voice—that voice!—the day of the rally out in front of the college, and then, when he had actually met her, he had decided within minutes that it would be criminal negligence on his part not to be in hot pursuit. Of course, he must not look as though he was in hot pursuit. Some girls don’t go for that. He ought to look like he was sauntering. Sauntering purposively.”
A Healthy Drill for Young Men
“It was the kind of family where the young men were expected to go off to school and then to make their own way in the world of great adventures—five years or so was respectable—before coming back and joining the firm in some useful and productive capacity. They were always expected to come back with a dragon head or two, and it was never looked down on if they came back with a beautiful and exotic woman from Ecuador or something. Trevor’s uncle had done that.”
Handling Snakes and Not Bitten
“Trevor Smith was the scion of a family that had plenty of bucks but which had somehow managed to keep that fact from rotting out the floorboards of its collective soul. They had money—quite a bit of it, actually—but for them, money was just bullets . . . Some people cast their bread on the waters, and all they get is soggy bread, or happy ducks. Others were like the Smith dynasty, and nobody quite knew how it worked.”
At Least Until Then
“I know this is a bull ride at the rodeo. And not eight seconds either. I know I have to ride until the bull pukes.”
Leaving Some Perfect Little Teeth Marks
“She was doing pretty well until about three minutes into his presentation. He gestured expansively, with the kind of gesture that he had found so effective in the impressing of freshman girls, and Maria almost lost it. His right hand moved languidly toward the ceiling, and Dr. Rollins was unable to keep himself from looking at it as it went. The board members, being all men, didn’t notice, but Maria did, and started biting her forefinger.”
More Like Tomoyto
“‘Some might have expected a flood of controversy like this to damage our . . . testimony.’ He remembered just in time that Dr. Tom hated the word brand, and so he veered at the last minute over to testimony. Tomayto, tomahto.”