A night at Leonello's
Duchess’s knack for storytelling shines through in his description of Leonello’s, an elite Italian restaurant that his father used to work at when he was younger:
"Leonello's, I began, is a little Italian place with ten booths, ten tables, and a bar. The booths are lined with red leather, the tables are draped with red and white cloths, and Sinatra's playing on the jukebox, just like you'd expect."
Small Town Life
A debate over which is preferable—the security of small-town life or the excitement of the big city—is depicted in vivid, descriptive terms from Duchess' point of view:
“There’s a certain charm to a town like this. And there’s a certain kind of person who would rather live here than anywhere else—even in the twentieth century. Like a person who wants to make some sense of the world. Living in the big city, rushing around amid all that hammering and clamoring, the events of life can begin to seem random. But in a town this size, when a piano falls out of a window and lands on a fellow’s head, there’s a good chance you’ll know why he deserved it.”
A man's opinion of himself
Sally dryly and wittily comments on the size of a man's ego after she emphatically corrects Emmett's misconception of her reason for joining them on their journey to California. She compares his opinion of himself to the size of America's biggest monuments and vast lands:
“As Emmett walked out the door and climbed into his bright yellow car, I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the prairie are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man’s opinion of himself.”
A multi-purpose bottle of whiskey
Duchess, sitting before Fitzy, considers the bottle of whiskey in his hands. He describes the shape and make of the bottle, which is easily inverted to form a surprisingly suitable blunt-force weapon.
“Hundreds of years ago, the whiskey bottle had been designed to have a body that was big enough for holding, and a neck that was narrow enough for pouring. But if you happened to invert the bottle, taking hold of the neck, suddenly it’s as if it had been designed to hit a blighter over the head. In a way, the whiskey bottle was sort of like a pencil with an eraser—with one end used for saying things, and the other for taking them back.”
