“Ohh,' said the girl with a sad tilt of her head.It was a response Sejal would hear a lot in the following weeks and which she would eventully come to understand meant, 'Ohh, India, that must be so hard for you, and I know because I read this book over the summer called The Fig Tree (which is actually set in Pakistan but I don't realize there's a difference) about a girl whose parents sell her to a sandal maker because everyone's poor and they don't care about girls there, and I bet that's why you're in our country even, and now everyone's probably being mean to you just because of 9/11, but not me although I'll still be watching you a little too closely on the bus later because what if you're just here to kill Americans?'There was a lot of information encoded in that one vowel sound, so Sejal missed most of it at first.”

“Woah,' I said, blocking the doorway. 'You can't come in here. This is the girls' room.' Even as it came out of my mouth, I knew it sounded dumb. Dumb, I thought and maybe even wrong.You...are a boy, aren't you?' I asked. 'I mean, don't take that the wrong way or anything -' J.Lo is a boy, yes.' I let that go.So...you Boov have boys and girls...just like us?' Of course,' said J.Lo. 'Do not be ridicumlous.' I smiled a wan little smile. 'Sorry.' The Boov have seven magnificent genders. There is boy, girl, girlboy, boygirl, boyboy, boyboygirl, and boyboyboyboy.' I had absolutely no response to this.”

“..and if you're reckless enough to back talk me, you're reckless enough to think you understand girls like June Watermark, and you don't understand her because she's crazy and crazy people-they're misunderstood. It's why they are called crazy. And you probably think you're in love with her-it's what Boystar told me you said in the Office, and that's a fine thing to say to a girl, but if you think you mean it, it's a different story. Because what's love without understanding Gurion? A fucken lie it is.”

“Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.”

“When I was a little girl,' I said, sitting down, 'the wallpaper in my room had pictures of Noah's story.' [...]You know what's weird though? It's weird that the ark would be such a kids' story, you know? I mean, it's...really a story about death. Every person who isn't in Noah's family? They die. Every animal, apart from two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It's the worst tragedy ever,' I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest.[...] 'What the hell,'I said, 'pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper?”

“Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. [...] 'Noble Savages of Earth,' he said. 'Long time we have tried to live together in peace.' (It had been five months.) 'Long time have the Boov suffered under the hostileness and intolerableness of you people. With sad hearts I now concede that Boov and humans will never to exist as one.' I remember being really excited at this point. Could I possibly be hearing right? Were the Boov about to leave? I was so stupid.'And so now I generously grant you Human Preserves - gifts of land that will be for humans forever, never to be taken away again, now.' [...] So that's when we Americans were given Florida. One state for three hundred million people. There were going to be some serious lines for the bathrooms.”

“Why would a vampire create a younger vampire if there was a possibility the young one might end up destroying the old one?'Stephin stared. 'If you can explain to me how this is different from parenting in general I might know how to answer that.”