“James might have enjoyed the day, but Hawk's mood was black and the girl's even blacker. The camp was like a battle line.”

“What’s blacker than black? Does summer shade have a shadow? Is that how loneliness looks and where it lurks?”

“Even on a black and empty street. If we go together, we might one day find something like the moon thats floats in the darkness.”

“It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.”

“To pass the time, I made valiant strides in my effort to read Ulysses, but feared I was losing the war. A hundred pages in, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that James Joyce might have been an asshole, and by Nebraska I was in a foul mood.”

“Win or lose, the crows always laughed--the hard, old jaded laughter that came of looking at the world with a black and practiced eye. From the less skillful the laugh might have hinted of despair, or silliness, like the magpies', but the crows were masters of the wry outlook, and Viv never heard them but what she followed their expert lead and laughed along--they knew the secret of black, that it could not be made blacker, and if neither could it be made lighter, it could still be made funnier.”