The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

“It’s not a penis,” she’ll tell her friend Elizabeth. “It’s a leash.” “No, it’s the whole puppy,” Elizabeth says. “You pet it, stroke it, kiss it, give it a warm place to sleep and it’ll go fetch things for you.”

And the tuberculosis old men At the Nelson wheeze and cough And someone will head south Until this whole thing cools off … —Tom Waits, “Small Change”

Retreated into silence, the slow poison of a marriage.

the hardest thing in the world isn’t to refrain from committing an evil, it’s to stand up and stop one.