“In hyenas, the clitoris carries urine, enables copulation, and serves as a birth canal. Yet it looks precisely like a male penis. Perhaps this is what hyenas are laughing about.”

“I am working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing.”

“Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot.”

“You are only what you are when no one is looking.”

“Whew,” he said. “You clean up good. You don’t look like the same girl.”She frowned right before she laughed. “Do women usually thank you for saying things like that?”

“He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.”

“He said that some people can live from birth to death and have no more thoughts in their heads about the reasons for living than a beetle. But that we were different, he and I. We needed more than a clod of dirt to make our rising up and lying down worth something.”