“Suddenly, the giant, three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the Underworld appears next to her—sans two of its heads—and sits down. As a child, we had a neighbor with a Great Dane, and I know they’re about three feet tall at the shoulder. Allow another twelve inches for their T-Rex-sized heads, and you’ve got a dog that this woman could throw a saddle on and ride like a pony.”

“Because trying to think of how to ask a woman you’ve known for exactly two days if she’d be willing to get into a car with you and take a road trip across the country was something I hadn’t quite worked up to yet.”

“Don’t make me Alice-nap you, Alice. Because you know I can carry you.”

“So ‘fatal’ only kills you two out of three times these days? That’s good to know.”

“...once I realized that Australia’s top highway speed of 110 kilometers per hour was the same as going 65 in the U.S., all my hardened American enthusiasm for speed went limp until it felt like the car was hardly moving at all. Even worse, most stretches of the highway are restricted to 60 kilometers per hour, which is how fast Americans go when we’re, like, passing a stopped school bus disembarking small children, or driving through a herd of puppies in the road.”

“How was I supposed to know ‘lucked out’ means ‘I got screwed over’ in Australian?”

“If one more person tells me how big this country is, I’m going to go kick a koala.”

“For the first time, there’s no barrier between us and we make eye contact. All of a sudden, I feel like the character in Raiders of the Lost Ark—the one who watches in horror as the wispy, beautiful angels floating from the Ark of the Covenant morph into howling, homicidal demons. You know, right before he melts like a cheap candle.”

“Once the principals in their party are seated, with those lower on the totem pole left to grumble and move on to find another table, our once-cozy booth transforms into a damp fusion of vacuous wretchedness, with the three women all complaining alternately about their wet hair/clothes and their respective distance from Talon, while the man himself is trying to maneuver his Paul Bunyan frame way too close to me.”

“You can pay for whatever you want, but I just want to warn you that I prefer to stay at places that don’t start or end with the word ‘motel.”

“The line from Pulp Fiction—the one Samuel L. Jackson shouts at John Travolta as they’re trying to wash blood off their hands—pops into my head: 'I used the same soap you did and when I dried my hands, the towel didn't look like no fuckin’ maxi-pad!' I almost—almost—share this most quotable of cinematic quotes with him, when I remember it contains The Word. You know: 'maxi-pad.”