“There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.”

“She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on.”

“The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go. ”

“It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.”

“What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home.”

“At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.”

“If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish.Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards? ”