- "Paola, did you know I have been blowing a silly line all this time. Mister Flab the original, is me. Lazy and taking for granted some wonder drug someplace to cure that town, to cure me. Now there isn't and never will be. Nobody is going to step down from heaven and square away Rooney and his woman, or Alabama, or South Africa or us and Russia. There's no magic words. Not even I love you is magic enough. Can you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov or Krushchev that? Ho-ho."
- "Keep cool but care," he said. Somebody had run over a skunk a ways back.
- (Thomas Pynchon, V., 1963, p. 366)