“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”

“Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.”

“We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”

“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”

“He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a net is no more than holes tied together, they were bonded by what was no longer there." (ARC p. 63)”

“Carrying that lumber the forty meters from the forest had left his knuckles blistered, his underarms sopping, but now a few hours of flames had lifted what had taken him months to design, weeks to carry, days to build, all but the nails and rivets, all but the hinges and bolts, all into the sky.”

“Like so many irritating details of the Universe(which, come to think of it, is made up almost wholly of irritating details), the truth is much more complicated than could be adequately covered by a binary yes-or-no, good-or-bad, old-or-new summary.”