A Hall of Mirrors

"If somebody ever tells you, Geraldine, that they need you, you tell them to buy a dog."

"You goin' to get killed one time, you know that?"

"You don't never get out of this world alive."

It brought him to a latticed gate over which a small, iron Christ stared down in wide-eyed rusty death from the gibbet of a green, oxidised cross.

"What's going on out there," Rheinhardt said, "is there are like a few billion people walking around and every one of them has a head with a lot of stuff going on in it."

"Honey, this town has got just one principal industry where girls is concerned. They can call it what they like but it generally always ends you up in the same position."

"When you stir up the bottom you naturally bring up some big fish."

"You and I, my boy, compose a tiny island of sanity in what is otherwise a fucking nuthouse."

"The Deep Six comes for all, babe, the rich man and Lazarus."

A different voice sounded from the field now, an old man's voice.

"Where are they now," the voice asked sadly, "those godly farms, the dear little streets of homely homes and friendly faces? Ploughed under, I say, or about to be - in this black age of arrogance and agitation, misfits and miscegenation! Friends, a teeming rootless rabble gnaws at the sacred fabric of our way of life. The sun shone less brightly on God's country this morning."

But you got to hang on, she thought. You got to hang on because if you lose hold you'll just break up and drift off and go washin' off the edge of this fuckin' world, you'll just melt down into a sprinkle of powder with nobody there, you'll be sawdust for them to sweep up or spit into.

This way madness lies.