“JEMAINELisa?BRETYes, she's in Delta Force. She's been deployed to Fallujah.JEMAINEBut she works in the croissant shop.BRETYeah, she's got two jobs. She's a pastry chef and a sniper.”

“She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.”

“She had hit rock-bottom. She had given a blow job to a man who for all intents and purposes, was a bum. He had smelled so bad, she forced him to spray on some of the perfume she always carried in her purse. Her favorite perfume. After tonight, she was quitting. Yeah, she’d have to go back home with her two kids, grovel to her mama and work a dead-end job, but anything was better than getting down on your knees to give a guy as disgusting as Lenny a one-off.”

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

“She often had to remind herself that she couldn't do everything alone. She wasn't always the best person for the job. Sometimes she got tunnel vision and forgot about what other people needed.”

“By the time she got there, she knew Blake had been right. She sounded like a herd of buffalo in the wild.”