Charles Portis
- The Dog of the South
I could hardly get my breath and I walked around and around the car. A boy with some schoolbooks stopped to watch me and I gave him ten pesos to remove the carcass. I tried to get a grip on myself. Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.
Charles Portis
- Gringos
He looked back on his long bright empty days in Mexico and said he had lost his honor over the years. He hadn't noticed it going. Small rodents had come in the night and carried it away bit by bit on tiny padded feet.
Charles Portis
- The Dog of the South
I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen. Whenever that kind of thing came up, he would always say - boast, the way those people do - that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.
Charles Portis
- The Dog of the South
He was sitting there in the gloom writing in a spiral notebook. He jumped when I opened the door and he closed the notebook and shoved it under a pillow. This bird has been composing something! I had caught him in the very act of putting pen to paper and his shame was painful to see.
Harper Lee
- To Kill A Mocking bird
The cats had long conversations with one another, they wore cunning little clothes and lived in a warm house beneath a kitchen stove. By the time Mrs. Cat called the drugstore for an order of chocolate malted mice the class was wriggling like a bucketful of catawba worms. Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.
Charles Portis
- Gringos
"Cuantos?" he asked me. I wrote "$150" on the palm of my hand and showed it to him. "Ni modo." No way. He made a quick slicing move on one index finger across the other. Too much. Cut your price in half. But he was only playing around. When a price really upset him, he called on St. James and the Virgin both in a whisper.
