“Because you have to roll with the punches, the good and the bad. You have to keep moving forward. It's like the river - even after all the crazy things that have happened, the river's not running backwards anytime soon.”

“If poetry is a circus, then the Big Tent we're under has to have room for a lot of different freak shows.”

“War stuttered, repeated its sentences, forgot its lessons, over and over.”

“She probably thought I was making a dumb joke, but sometimes history sounded like a dumb joke. History was either a dumb joke or a cruel joke.”

“In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.”

“I don't play bad guys. I play people who make choices that are different from other people's.”

“You must have loved her awfully," I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead. "Yes, sometimes very much," Porcelain said reflectively, "-and sometimes not at all." She must have seen my startled reaction. "Love's not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you're a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing's left but a trickle..." "Or stopped completely, I added.”