“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”

“Harriet Jones: When they fart, if you'll pardon the word, it doesn't smell like a fart, pardon the word, it's like something else. What is it? It's more like um...Rose: Bad breath!Harriet Jones: That's it!The Doctor: Calcium decay! Now that narrows it down! Calcium phosphate. Organic calcium—living calcium—creatures made out of living calcium, what else? What else? Hyphenated surname! YES! That narrows it down to one planet: Raxacoricofallapatorius!Mickey Smith: [dryly] Oh yeah, great. We can write 'em a letter!”

“There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.”

“Some things don't pass, the injuries don't heal they merely find a place in our guts and in our bones where they fitfully rest, tossing and turning between our knuckles and ribs waiting to wake as the shadows grow long.”

“There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me. My closest is a good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these thoughts inside my head where no one can hear them.”

“With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.”