“So whatever you think of me, don't pity me. I had a beautiful life. I was loved, admired, feted, copied, mocked, treasured, and feared. I am one hundred years old and I am no longer afraid of anything.”

“There is no greater pleasure than winning a competition with one's sister and no greater sorrow than to see her suffer because of it.”

“Know me, Amber. I am Amelia Hoffman, and that," I said emphatically, gesturing towards them, "is my family. And if you or anyone does anything to harm them, I will turn the wrath of the Earth Mother on you. I will turn this entire town into a desert waste if I have to, but I will protect my family. If that makes us enemies, then I will weep for you when you are dead.”

“I don’t want to know wreckage, dreck, and waste, but these are the materialsand so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly.over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling inanother season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain. If you had known meonce you’d still know me though in a differentlight and life. This is no place you ever knew me.But it would not surprise youto find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great oceaneluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as alwaysI fix on the land. I am stuck to earth…these are not the roadsyou knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watchingfor life and death, is the same.”

“Well, more or less, you just got struck by lightning.""Wait, what?" My brain stopped processing for a prolonged moment unable to wrap around that one. How the hell had that happened? "So basically I was filled with 1.21 jiggawatts?Can I travel through time now?”

“Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossomingand I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country. The history of this earth and the bones within it?Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fibre, one womanlike and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing…A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot us one who wrestles for the soul of her countryas she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country…”

“I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child”