“Some ideas are not born of logic and good sense. They are made of clouds and cobwebs. They sprout from nowhere and feed on excitement, sprinkled with adventure juice and the sweet flavor of the forbidden. The psyche moves from the realms of the ordinary and takes a delicate step towards the unknown. We know we shouldn't and that is exactly why we do.”

“Twenty miles out of town. A million miles from the life you left behind.”

“they do not kissbut they both want toinstead their feet touch and so do their armsit is electric magictheir tiny arm hairs tinglinghappily lying togetherthe sun warming themwatching sky through green-leafed gum branchclose enough to hear each other breathesweet togethernessthis lazy lying down dance of love”

“. . . blah blah blah and rhubarb.”

“I'm hungry for a juicy life. I lean out my window at night and I can taste it out there, just waiting for me.”

“Rewriting a peace treaty," he said. "Semester project."Talk about a thrill-a-minute. "Why are we moving the desks?"He snorted. "Who the hell knows. He probably read about this in a teachers' magazine.”

“I didn't understand the war. It was new, and they all said it would be there for a long time, but where it was, exactly, was one of the things I didn't understand. It seemed to be out-of-doors, and that was why we had the blackout curtains, so that we didn't have to look at it at night–or it didn't have to look at us, perhaps. Yet on some nights we sat on the balcony and watched searchlights play across the dark sky, and that had to do with the war, too. So the war was in the sky, somehow.And it was there in the daytime, though I was not sure where. It was why sometimes, during school, whistles blew, and we had to run to the subway station.”