“You'll notice a blond person is expected to talk. If a blond girl doesn't talk we call her a 'doll'; if a light-haired man is silent he's considered stupid. Yet the world is full of 'dark silent men' and 'languorous brunettes' who haven't a brain in their heads, but somehow are never accused of the dearth.”

“Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, whereas blonde hair symbolises femininity, tenderness, weakness, and passivity. Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman. A princess can only be blonde. That's also why, to be as feminine as possible, women dye their hair yellow- but never black""I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul", said Bertlef doubtfully."it's not a matter of pigments. A blonde unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. Especially if the blonde is a brunette who dyes her hair yellow. She tries to be faithful to her hair colour and behaves like a fragile creature, a shallow doll, she demands tenderness and service, courtesy and alimony, she's incapable of doing anything for herself, all refinement on the outside and coarseness on the inside. If black hair became a universal fashion, life on this world would clearly be better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved.”

“A framed photo on a dusty bookshelf caught his attention; he moved closer and picked it up silently. A small girl with long blond hair was standing under a tree, her face tilted up in delight as its feathery leaves brushed across her face, framing it.A willow tree. Willow.”

“You go to a party or whatever, and you spend the whole night zeroing in on the woman in red, the blonde in the corner, the girl with the big laugh, and then, as you are leaving, you see someone out of the corner of your eye, her hair glinting in the light, her long neck tilted slightly as she listens intently to the person next to her. And you know she's the one you should of talked to.”

“...and when she thinks of that generation of silent men, the boys who lived through the Depression and grew up to become soldiers or not-soldiers in the war, she doesn’t blame them for refusing to talk, for not wanting to go back into the past, but how curious it is, she thinks, how sublimely incoherent that her generation, which doesn’t have much of anything to talk about yet, has produced men who never stop talking, men like Bing, for example, or men like Jake, who talks about himself at the slightest prompting, who has an opinion on every subject, who spews forth words from morning to night, but just because he talks, that doesn’t mean she wants to listen to him, whereas with the silent men, the old men, the ones who are nearly gone now, she would give anything to hear what they have to say.”

“It doesn't bother me when someone calls me a 'dumb blonde.' I'm neither dumb or blonde.”