“And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the body at all.”

“Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.”

“Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below.”

“I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.”

“I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?”

“Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.”

“And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.”