“....I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.”

“They were truly new people. No longer Forest People, certainly not the Horde. They were outcasts. They were the chosen. Those who had died. Those who lived.”

“I had seen these transformations, people who had lost their will to live, coming back from their zombie states and radiating a new life force from their eyes.”

“The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives.”

“I took notes as they divided the world between those who had stuff taken away from them, and those who took, those who did bad things in a good way- gracefully, effortlessly- and those bumblers who bumbled their way through life.”

“Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.”