selected passages

Armed with a milkshake, Sean had left the McDonald's and walked to the waterfront, where he'd hoped he might kill time in the company of a cool sea breeze. But there was no cool sea breeze. There was an executive-bathroom hand-drier blowing down his neck. The milkshake had turned to chocolate soup before it was even a quarter finished, the bench he'd chosen was like leaning against an oven door, and the sparse canopies of the palm trees had offered nothing more than a rumor of shade. (p.5)

The rats and mosquitoes had packed their bags and checked out. With a citywide network of slums on the doorstep, there was no sense in hunting for food scraps or skin here. A parasite could afford to be choosy. But the cockroaches had decided that the hotel still had something to offer. They'd stuck around, multiplied like crazy, seething in the gap between the mattress base and the flooor, slipping through the vent of the long-dead air-con unit. Completely indifferent to everything, happy in a pile of shit. Hard to find a creature that cared for the company of cockroaches, hard to find a cockroach that cared. (p.10)

Strange, though. To think that even at a time like this, your skin could still get tickled. The mind intent and serious, and the body frigging around, letting you down. Like running from something bad, only to discover that your legs still ache and start to seize up, and you still get short of breath. Discovering that trouble doesn't provide miracle lungs, the way you wish it would. (p.58)

In fact, until the funeral procession left the church and reached the graveyard, it was the priest who had provoked Rosa's strongest emotional response. Watching him—this fleshy, closeted, virginal man who had gone out of his way to experience as little of life as possible—Rosa felt a surge of irritation. It seemed absurd that such a lifeless person should be called upon to clarify the end of someone else's. (p.166)

Alfredo waved a hand. "That boy is useless. All he dreams about is guns and girls, and fighting battles in which he is the hero. And, needless to say, they aren't even his real dreams. They're his fantasies." (p.185)

Good odds of survival, if you are a light-year-thick block of lead, trying to blow your brains out with a neutrino gun. (p.224)

Totoy's mother isn't going to hell; she's in it. Your father isn't in hell, because nobody is. And he isn't in paradise, because nobody's there either. When a street gang chases you down unfamiliar streets, when you hit the pavement outside Legaspi Towers at two hundred miles an hour, nothing happens. (p.236)

"When you say, 'I just thought of something,' what you mean is, 'I just stopped thinking of something.' You've been having the thought for a while, turning it over in your mind, developing it, without realizing you were doing so. Maybe for days or weeks. Maybe even years." (p.272)

"God!" he exclaimed, as if his faith had been punched out of his body. (p.273)