“New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.”

“I did not see anything [New York 1886] to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus [white man] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.”

“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.”

“For everything there is a season. I'd miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons (it has for example "fire season" or "the season when the fire comes," and it also has the season when the rains comes, but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death.Seasons in New York-the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves-suggest only death.”

“There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”

“People all over town had listened for my grandfather's cries, but there were none. Only silence.”