“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”

“Never cross a woman with a star on a stick, young lady. They've got a mean streak.”

“She sticks to the rules, because it's all she's got. It's like her feelings dried up and they were replaced with a pile of useless laws. Like my appendix. Don't know what I need it for, but it's still there.”

“She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry.”

“Housework is what a woman does that nobody notices unless she hasn't done it.”

“I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.”