“You Griersons are a touchy bunch. One minute it's biscuits and model ships and the next minute it's outrage and horror.”

“She thinks of James Grierson. His Kisses tasted like whiskey, and they landed right and true.”

“Hey, girl. You awake over there?""Yeah, I'm awake."Just this seems to satisfy him for a minute. Confirmation of awakeness, the fraternity of insomniacs.”

“To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.”

“It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much.”

“...you can't put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It's like a dang vocation with them”

“...and she's thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.”