“With the elevator stopped between floors, my view is about a cockroach above the green linoleum, and from here at cockroach level the green corridor stretches toward the vanishing point, past half-open doors where titans and their gigantic wives drink barrels of champagne and bellow to each other wearing diamonds bigger than I feel.”

“The point is: have you ever noticed how we crush a cockroach without further worry and feel no remorse in spite of being in fact terminating a life? That's it. We do so because we don't identify ourselves with a cockroach. Because it's very diffent from us. [...] Thinking from that side, I suppose some people tend to do the same towards others. I mean, they see from distance those they don't identify with on the spot, do you get me? It's as if the stranger, who doesn't belong to the same group as we do, was seen as an inferior being... Almost a cockroach!”

“You cannot disgrace a disgraceful man; you cannot make a shameless man feel ashamed; you cannot make a cockroach a cockroach, because it is already a cockroach!”

“We fucked, Ms. Lane. Even cockroaches fuck. They eat each other, too.”

“I opened the door and stepped down onto something squishy. It was moss, velvety smooth, creating uneven hills of emerald green across the floor of the laundry. I slipped off my silver ballet flats, and my feet sank into the floor”

“The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.”