“After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.”

“The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”

“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

“Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.”

“Hell, who was she kidding? The only thing that could clear her head today would be a lobotomy.”