"There's no accounting for laws. Or the changes wrought by men and time." Chap. 1, p. 3

"Once, the Great Northern had been a fine Western hotel, where prospectors who had hit it and ranchers who could afford it came to raise hell in Victorian splendor." Chap. 1, p. 13

"During his more lucid moments, Simon often said that when I grew old enough to become a full-time drunk, he and I would have a worthless contest, and he maintained that I would lose because I lacked the necessary character to forgo the last vestiges of middle-class morality." Chap. 2, p. 24

"After two years and three months as an infantryman in the Korean War and ten years as a deputy sheriff, I knew how to be sacred." Chap. 3, p. 42

"Jamison and I, as they say, go way back. We had been raised in Meriwether—same age, same grade in school, all that...