FAVORITE LINES

I recently finished a book called Amy Falls Down, by Jincy Willett. The main character in the book, Amy, is a writer. She carries around a notebook, as many writers do (not me, I "dog-write"); and every so often she will jot down a word or phrase which she might encounter during her day, which she thinks of as a great title for a story. She uses the list both as an inspiration and a reminder of her own creative thought process.
In that spirit, I have decided to create a space here, for the lines in my own work which I like the best.
In almost any piece of writing I've done, there has been at least one sentence or paragraph which makes me smile quietly to myself and think, "That was a good one." Here they are:

From "Little Green Men":
 I have learned that if you’re at a cocktail party, for instance, and you start a story, “I once woke up in an ATM in Mount Vernon after we went to a Grace Jones concert and bought a whole bunch of ‘ludes from this guy named Disco Donny,” people will laugh and think you’re urbane and sophisticated. But if you start a story by saying, “I saw a UFO once,” people will just think you’re crazy or some kind of conspiracy theorist.

From "Mission: H2O" (an essay about being sick with the flu):
Things which were of monumental importance to you yesterday will vanish completely from your priorities. Gotta get those whites washed? Ha! Need to check those spreadsheets on the Henderson account? Fuck the Hendersons. At this point, the world is lucky if you can stand up long enough to crank the thermostat up to 80°.

From: "Black & White":
 So, I’m mentally naming the navy blue of her suit “Mediocrity” when she drops the folder on my desk and says, “Goth!”

From: "Adrift":
I had just killed Aleksandr, the marsupial demi-god who was worshipped by the little Estonian circus cult I had found myself in. Now what do I do?
and
The only German I can speak is “Sprechen-zie Deutsche?”, which means “Do you speak German?”, which is a completely useless phrase to know when you are actually in a German city.

From: "Leap of Faith":
And when the nuns were singing “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” I always imagined that was how the Sisters were talking about me when I wasn’t around; that although I seemed shy and plain and boring to everyone around me, in reality I was something special and ethereal like a moonbeam. 
and
Anyway, St. Kwiatoslaw is something like 98% Polish. That’s OK with me, I don’t have anything against Polish people, except maybe their last names, which are all really long and full of too many z’s and k’s and y’s and things. Like if I was Polish, my name Smyth would be spelled Sczmythczkie or something.

From "Class of '84":
“Here you go, sweet heart,” she said. Mrs. Thornton always said “sweetheart” as if it were two words.

From "Dear John":
I mean, it’s weird: sometimes time seems to be crawling by at a snail’s pace, like on Monday morning it seems like Friday afternoon is forever away. But then before you know it, five years have flown by, and then ten, or fifteen, and it feels like you spent the whole time just trying to pay the bills and keep the living room vacuumed.

From "In-Laws, Squared":
The town where Bill grew up is called Cabot Cove, just like the one on “Murder, She Wrote.” It’s not so much a town, from what I could see, as it is a quantity of space between some stop signs, although I did see a fire hydrant and a mailbox.

From "The Raven & The Writing Desk":
She looked more as if someone had chopped off Liz Taylor’s head (fat, old, over-the-hill Liz, that is) and stuck it on a stake, like they used to do in medieval London, and then hung a Chanel suit over the stake. Her hair was enormous and exactly the color of a nice Napa Valley Merlot. Her face looked as if she had gotten a good old-fashioned facelift back in the 1970s and simply let it go since then, so she has actually had the chance to grow old and wrinkly twice.

From: "Untitled, or First Train Out of Toyland":
I never really understood what people meant when they said things like somebody “looks Jewish.” I mean, how do you look like a religion? But when I met Mary Margaret, I finally understood, because Mary Margaret looks about as un-Jewish as anyone can look.
and
People realized that it’s not always the words and the prayers that are important, it’s everybody being together and seeing each other through all the different stages in their lives, and laughing at the stuff that's actually funny, even if it is inside a church or a synagogue or whatever.

From: "Independence Day":
We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have:
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”

From a Facebook status:  I noticed that she smelled heavenly, sort of like warm vanilla or freshly baked Madeleines. I later learned it was some sort of orthopedic skin cream for the chronically desiccated that she was wearing, formulated by the very same Biochemical Engineer responsible for Cher's remarkable state of mummification.