Dismissed with a touch of ceremony

Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.

Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.

I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

What do these lines have in common?

Also, inexplicably missing from the list, what should be the paradigm case:

I said he was one of the last of the great romantics. I said there used to be two. But now there was just the one left. The hairy one.

(the post title via John Updike, via here)

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.