“The human body is amazing," she said. If you deprive it of one sensory input, the other senses take over, almost instantly.”

“For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.”

“It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.”

“Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.”

“You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home.”

“Explorations of the world are simultaneously explorations of the human body and being, charting the range of sensory experiences possible in the world and the values that can be attached to such experiences”