“She had taken her vows and then they had taken her, and the forces amassed against her were greater than love, greater than obligation. They were elemental, heavy as a dead planet.”

“I couldn't for the life of me figure out how long a person had to live, or how good she had to be, to get her hands on some treasure.”

“laura had hoped, she'd written in her journal, that whatever befell her daughters, they would not be damaged at the level of instinct, that exact phrase. ”

“Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.”

“He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began...She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him―that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.”

“The pigs were pushing their noses through the slats in the truck bed, which made Langston so unaccountably sad she thought she would have to sit down on the sidewalk. How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling, animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself? And what were the pigs searching for, after all, but air and freedom?”

“My mom insisted on saying such things, even though almost no one understood what she meant. My Dad sometimes called her Addlebrain because she read so many books.”