Carl Hiaasen

The show's producers had strategically cultivated a fandom with two distinct segments: those who were cynically amused by the boorish culture of the Nance clan, and those who identified with it. Each week, the writers strived to portray the brothers on a social bandwidth halfway between harmless rednecks and odious white trash. It was a precarious tightwire. (Chapter 14)

Ryskamp stared up at the constellations and took a long, quiet breath. "Okay. What about the First Lady? She weighs a hundred and twenty-one pounds."

"The python would have to be exceptionally large and hungry," Angie explained, "and the First Lady would have to be exceptionally unlucky. These things aren't like Rottweilers. You can't train 'em to seek and attack." She smiled grimly. "Can you guys believe this f**ked-up conversation?" (Chapter 18)

Mockingbird sometimes found it hard to believe this was the same man she'd married. He looked like a different person now, as if someone had put a fire hose up his ass and inflated him with meringue. His ego seemed to have swollen proportionately. It wasn't that long ago when she'd fallen hard for him. Now he was a raging, gaseous oaf. Gone was any trace of the sly charm and tenderness. In their early years, he could actually laugh at himself, but Mockingbird couldn't recall the last time she'd seen an honest smile on his face. (Chapter 17)

For all its daring, the plan was also laughably, fatally absurd. Later his mother would tell reporters that it proved she was right about living downwind from the paper mills. All those toxic vapors obviously stewed poor Benny's brain cells. A goddamn squirrel had more sense. (Chapter 19)

"'The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.' That's from Emerson, by the way. All I was hoping to do is stretch some goddamn minds." (Epilogue)

"You think he could be right about this Diego kid being involved in the old woman's death?"

Ryskamp looked up with a rueful smile. "Don't you get it? It doesn't f**king matter whether he's right or not. That's the scary part." (Chapter 10)

"I know you're not a stupid person, so why would you ask such a stunningly stupid question?" (Chapter 28)

She fell asleep anticipating another enigmatic dream. Tonight's feature starred the Commander-in-Chief himself. Angie had been summoned to Casa Bellicosa to unfasten a screech owl from the Presidential pompadour, which the low-swooping raptor had mistaken for a roadkill fox. When Angie arrived, the Commander-in-Chief was lurching madly around the helipad, bellowing and clawing at the Velcro skullcap into which the confused bird had embedded its talons. The owl was still clutching a plug of melon-colored fibers when Angie freed it. Swiftly she was led to a windowless room and made to sign a document stating she'd never set foot on the property or glimpsed the President without his hair. A man wearing a Confederate colonel's uniform and a red baseball cap stepped forward and hung a milk chocolate medal around Angie's neck, after which she was escorted at sword point out the gates. She awoke with renewed certainty that Carl Jung was full of shit. (Chapter 2)

Angie tried not to think much about politics. It didn't seem to matter who was in power. Nothing got better in the besieged, breathtaking world she cared about most. The Everglades would never be the lush, unbroken river it once was; the shallows of Florida Bay would never be as pure and sparkling with fish; the bleached, dying reefs of the Keys would never bloom back to life. Being overrun and exploited was the historical fate of places so rare and beautiful. Every year, Angie diligently wrote checks to the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, but she was too much of a loner to jump into the fray. No meetings, no rallies, no Facebook petitions. Never once had she fired off an angry letter to a congressman or a county commissioner. Sometimes she wondered if she was too cynical or just too lazy. The sitting President of the United States was a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors, but in Angie's view, at this point Teddy Roosevelt himself couldn't turn the tide if he came back from the dead. All the treasured wilderness that had been sacrificed at the altar of growth was gone for all time. More disappeared every day. Nothing ever changed, except the speed of destruction, and only because there were fewer pristine pieces to sell off, carve up, and pave. (Chapter 24)

"Okay, Angie, just to be clear," Ryscamp said, clearing his throat, "you're telling me the crazy old f**k fed LSD to a twenty-four-foot killer python?"

"Look, I know you guys don't train for situations like this..."

"There's never been a situation like this!" (Chapter 27)

At first she had disliked the code name chosen for her by the Secret Service. Then she'd watched a YouTube video about actual mockingbirds, which were crafty, graceful, and melodious. Like me, she thought. Once upon a time. The President's Secret Service code name was "Mastodon." He loved it. "Perfect!" he'd boomed when he was told. "Fearless, smart, and tough!" And enormous, she'd said to herself. Don't forget f**king enormous. On only his second day in the White House, the President had ordered his Chief of Staff to arrange a trip to the National Zoo for a close-up look at a real mastodon. The Chief of Staff wasn't brave enough to tell the President the truth, so he cooked up a story that the Zoo's beloved mastodon herd was on loan to a wildlife park in Christchurch, New Zealand. The President had scowled, muttered something about "those snotty Kiwis" and soon gotten sidetracked by another daft notion. (Chapter 5)

The pilot episode of Bayou Brethren was a major disappointment, the visual appeal of high-def hog shit having been seriously overestimated by a network vice president who was summarily promoted to a more harmless position. The new network vice president in charge of the project felt the brothers needed a more esoteric vocation, to distract from their unappealing personalities, a view shared by potential advertisers who'd screened the off-putting pilot. (Chapter 1)