“My best friend [. . .] was also dead, his head having been caught like bulk laundry in the giant rollers of a steel foundry.” 

This quote, part of Eddie’s discussion about death at the front of the text, hits the reader hard because of the image that is painted. Someone’s head being described as being “like bulk laundry” caught in those steel rollers is harsh and memorable. It’s a shocking death, and its ugliness foreshadows the rest of the novel’s events. 

“The students of that ghoulish business had to stand in the sun and quiver until the heat returned to their bodies.”

This quote, referencing the mortuary studies students, functions at once as commentary for the grim reality of day-to-day life in Fresno and, at a metafictional level, the equally grim duty of documenting that world.  

I had a theory about those vapors which were not released by the sun’s heat but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry […] I thought about the giant onion, that remarkable bulb of sadness.” 

One of numerous references to the power and stench of onions beneath his feet, this quote provides a sense of Eddie’s strong imagination as well the imaginary onion metaphorically emphasizing sorrow.