He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him.

No matter how many good deeds we preform, they aren__ the ticket to earning God__ favor. God graces us in spite of what we do in this life, not because of.

It's funny, leaving a place, ain't it?" he said. "You never do know when you'll get back.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

Well," he said. "I hope to God I never make forty -- I wouldn't know what to do with myself.