“Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.”

“A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.”

“It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?”

“Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away.”

“The line in the sand was drawn. A man did not sleep with his friend, especially not a man like him, one utterly incapable of caring for a woman outside of the bedroom. He couldn’t treat Cass that way. He would not touch the friend. No licking the friend, either. If he could get away with not looking at her, he’d do it.”

“The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.”