A summer Saturday in Dallas and the boy Howard sat out on the back steps, knees up, propping in between, an old single load, twelve-gauge shotgun. While he steadied and squeezed the butt in one hand, the other, with studied unbroken slowness, wrapped a long piece of friction tape around and around the stock

After Mr. Fisher lost his job as a brakeman on the Katy he bought a second-hand Chevrolet sedan and drove it as a dime taxi for a while, but there wasn’t enough money in it, so he decided he would make pies.

In the beginning there was Ben, just Ben alone before Laura or Landis or the Spaniard, but before Ben there had been others living where Ben was to live. Living, cooking, eating, and burning lights in the middle of the night and descending and ascending the stairs and coming and going and taking their keys and putting them back again and paying their bills or not paying them and being quiet or noisy and predictable and erratic and walking the roof in spring.

Dick Donaldson, who in deference to the sundown tradition of the East, was having his first drink of the day, thanked God when he sipped it that this one, unlike all other drinks he had had in Ceylon, was made not with arak, but with real English gin.

The winter had set in earlier than usual. It was the beginning of November and already wet snow was scudding about, driven along by a storm. Sometimes it seemed as though the wind, rising after a breathing space, would smash the row of low houses and scatter their remains.

The land was flat, almost barren, the grass grown wild and untended between the trees which stood spread like outpost sentinels, lonely under the immense sky. He hadn’t seen another car, 

Looking through crisscrossings of blackberry vines, Gable could see an early sky in flashing tatters, and he knew the heat knotted thick and wiry outside. Disturbed, he had been watching for rain clouds since the night before, but even now, though it was way past daybreak,

The summer that Henry Wilder was in love with Jane Pratt—he was fifteen then—he was also much under the influence of Otis Purney. 

Nobody had much respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year 

After an hour’s fishing, Reuel had caught two perch and a sunfish and Peter had caught nothing. He complained good-naturedly to Reuel that he, himself, had done all the suffering while Reuel had had all the luck.