“Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.”
“We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.”
“They were amazing, fierce, beautiful children.”
“Men and women, they were beautiful and wild, all a little violent under their pleasant ways and only a little tamed.”
“The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls--blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked--stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).”
“This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.”