“Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs ... Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.”

“My worthless self lives on at the bottom of every expression, like an indissoluble residue at the bottom of a glass from which only water was drunk.”

“The world beyond the water was a blue of green and stone and blue. A moment later Yoshi pushed through, the water pouring down in sheets so smooth it looked like glass, and stepped into the calm [p. 296]”

“And as Flora twirled, other girls and women came through the field in all directions. Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

“Listening to the sound of the water, her sound, her lovely body glistening through the room a moment from now. There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.”