“Their next reunion shifted like an oasis on the horizon, and Jude couldn't plot her course. She trudged through her days, haunted by the feeling that real life was happening five thousand kilometers away.”

“She was with Jude so rarely that when she was, every cell of her body rang with grateful knowledge of it.”

“She leaped into space, high, higher than she'd ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.”

“Daffy had stopped talking, without her noticing. It was if he'd run out of words. He did a peculiar thing, then; he reached out and touched Mary's cheekbone; lightly, as if he was brushing away a speck of coal dust. She thought of Doll, that first morning, wiping mud out of the lost child's eyes. Her throat hurt, all at once, as if she were swallowing a stone. She wished the two of them could stay forever frozen in this moment, hidden in the grass, as the setting sun slid across the fields of Monmouth. Before any asking, any refusal. While this strange, tame young man was still looking at her as is she were worth any price.”

“When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.”

“It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I'm kind of hers.”

“It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.”