“We would be allowed to work and not cause any trouble for her, but she didn't want us to be any more successful than she was”

“She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.”

“She took a step and didn't want to take any more, but she did.”

“She truly believed that she carried her own fate in the palm of her hand, as if destiny was nothing more than a green marble or a robin's egg, a trinket any silly girl could scoop up and keep. She believed that all you wanted, you would eventually receive, and that fate was a force which worked with you, not against you.”

“Meg often slept with men she didn't want to sleep with: she didn't know how to say no. More precisely, she didn't know she was allowed to say no.”

“The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn't working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit.”