"The road's the only thing I look at; that's what I'm paid for . . . to look at the road." Section 1, p. 11

"Compared to shame, death is nothing." Section 1, p. 15

"Wretched dregs, soaked in fear and vice; yet they had gambled with death, staking their lives on the razor's edge of a lie between partisans and fascists." Section 2, p. 28

"But Sicily is all a realm of fantasy and what can anyone do there without imagination?" Section 3, p. 35

"'He was born a policeman, as one is born a priest or a cuckold.'" Section 4, p. 49

"'The people, democracy, . . . are fine inventions; things dreamed up at a desk by people who know how to shove one word up the backside of another, and strings of words up the backside of humanity, with all due respect . . .'" Section 4, p. 52

". . . by Mother Church he meant his own inviolable self and the sacred knot of...