“There's a big ruckus under way down at the Rusty Plug. The miners are really tearin' the bone out.”

“You're tearin' my guts out, Claire.”

“Working in the tea fields under a beautiful sunshine is the dream of all the miners.”

“There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.”

“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”

“It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?”