“He snagged two more pieces of wood from her load for good measure. "Martise, bearing children is woman's work. Gurn and I would be sitting in the dark every night if we waited for some wandering female to pick up sticks for us.”

“Ginny yelled through her megaphone as we worked, telling us to view the trash we picked up as a gathering of all the souls we affected with our drug use. To see each piece as one more person who forgave us.I picked up an empty box of adult diapers and wondered who that was supposed to be.”

“I daydream - and get paid for it. I recall a scene from An Officer and a Gentleman. At the end of the movie Richard Gere, dressed in his naval whites, goes into a factory, picks up Debra Winger, and carries her out of that depressing place with all of those dirty machines.I wish that would happen to me. Of course the whole time I'd be worried that the guy was trying to guess my weight or something. I realize how truly pathetic I am. Some guy in a uniform drags his woman out of the workplace to stick her in a house to cook and possibly even clip coupons, and I am staring to buy into it, into the anti-female propaganda disguised as romance. As soon as he picks her up, things have to head south from there, because at some point, he has to put her down.”

“He placed his hands on the sides of her face and looked into her eyes."You're not some woman I picked up in a bar, Chelsea. You're not a one-night stand. Don't sneak out on me.”

“We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.”

“In my carpet bag are the mushrooms that I gathered in the woods. With two fingers I pick up a piece and look at it. Then I take a bite and wait for my body to react. Now I'm in a better mood. In a short time I'll be dead. Or alive. I'm not always sure that there's any difference.”