“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”

“A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.”

“She'd read in novels of people who couldn't speak because their hearts were too full and she'd always thought, Not my black heart. But now she couldn't speak, because it was too much, whatever it was.”

“When we were first married, I thought he must have been the most heartless, hateful man I'd ever known, but he was just as much a prisonor as I was. Where Vaughn imprisoned me with walls, he imprisoned his son with ignorance.”

“I thought you were her knight, but you have become only her woodsman--taking little girls into the forest to cut out their hearts.”

“The madman bum and angel beat in time with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years”