“Be nice to her,” I muttered under my breath. “She’s my sister; she got sick. She lost her kid. For all I know, she may have eaten her.”

“I knew Lynn was a "professional." Like all of the therapists I had seen before her, she was talking to me because she was getting paid to do so. But she was better at pretending that she cared. Her body language and sympathetic "umm' suggested that she really listened. (12)”

“She knew she needed Lynn, so she wouldn't get angry at her. Jo's parents had taught her long ago that it was not safe to get angry at someone she depended on. (53)”

“So am I dead? How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal.”

“Isn't it wonderful when people do that, when you put all your faith in their being selfish and self -centered and not giving a damn and it turns out, all that time, you were wrong?”

“She had told Erstwhile too much in the past, and thus he knew that occasionally she did go crazy. Sometimes it was when she felt particularly trapped or hopeless, or when the tunnels were unusually dark or stuffy, or when she got stuck in a crawl-through. Sometimes it happened for no obvious reason at all. She would feel a terrible panic tightening her chest and giving her heart a queasy lollop, she would be fighting for breath . . . and then she would be recovering somewhere, shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings.”

“The whole right side of his face was smashed in, concave forehead and crushed cheekbone and one eye bugging precariously from a broken socket. He was purplish-black, and dirty white: Maggots seethed from every pore and crawled across him in excited wriggly piles, blowflies waving and blooming and wilting, the bits of bone they'd scraped clean glinting like tiny mosaic tiles. Scraps of jeans and a leather jacket clung to the sticky seething mess of his flesh. He was big, big shouldered, a good foot taller; chit-chitter, he went, even standing still.”