“There's nothing worse than a girl who thinks she's hot, unless of course she's on fire. And either way, you should throw water on her.”

“This is no time for drinking a mug of water - which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don't drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink... mug of water.”

“It was deeper than some boy thinking she was cute. It was more like she was food and he was hungry. It was as if Mars needed her to survive.”

“Can you create a vacuum out of a human life? A state where everything’s possible but nothing very likely? Does something new emerge when there’s no more empty space?”

“It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.''Really?''Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.''The what?''History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.'They drove on the humming highway for a while.Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.''What question?''Do you think he's any good?''Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.''Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh.James paused for a long moment... He said, 'There's one Boben book, I think it's Cold Season, or maybe it's Comfort of Winter, which ends with the line, "a story which Canadians must never tire of telling." What do you think of that line? A story which Canadians must never tire of telling.'She shrugged. 'I have no idea.''I'll tell you what you think of it. You don't give a shit. I'll tell you what I think of it. I don't give a shit either. But I also think it's the worst bullshit I've ever heard. I think,' he said, accelerating, 'that Ludwig Boben is a fucking asshole.”

“She was still loping around on all fours, her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. "Caramba!" She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing.”

“She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year...That's the way to do it, the grown up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”