“Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a one-legged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his descendants. Stanley and his parents didn’t believe in curses, of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone.”
“I don’t know who hired you or what they told you about the job, but it starts to wear on you. It’s not all changing bedsheets and cleaning plates. You have to look without seeing, hear without listening. We’re objects up there, living statues meant to serve….Especially now, with this Scarlet Guard business. It’s never a good time to be a Red, but this is very bad.”
“ ‘Luck, good or bad,’ said Rumfoord up in his treetop, ‘is not the hand of God.’
‘Luck,’ said Rumfoord up in his treetop, ‘is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.’ ”
“Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don’t care for spill orange soda all over himself.”
″‘Couldn’t Great-Grandma have used the names again, once the children were dead?’ asked Inez, being practical.
‘And how would brother and sister be told apart in Heaven, may I ask? And the bad luck! Consider the bad luck!‘”