“I went into geology because I like being outdoors, and because everybody in geology seemed, well, they all seemed like free spirits or renegades or something. You know, climbing mountains and hiking deserts and stuff.”

“Her skirts are long and don't seem to have straight hems, and her shirts are loose and hang over the skirts, so it's hard to see where one ends and the other begins. But with her children, she has clear control. They flow around her like her long skirts, flapping away and returning. Karen knows they will return to her side, like a magnet assured of its eternal attraction to tiny metal filings.”

“People who buy lottery tickets are not people who are going to send their kids to college.”

“Given the proper incentive, no mountain, it seems, is too high to climb, no current too swift to swim, if one is a Cherokee.”

“It doesn't matter what you look like on the outside, because anyone who knows you knows what a great guy you are on the inside. You're honest and true.”

“I don’t know, Mitzi.” Kai sighed and stared up at the sky as if it held her answers. Yeah right, for something like her, a demoness? “He makes me feel . . .”Loved?” Mitzi offered.Kai laughed. “Unhinged.”

“By ten o'clock, the Sunday-night blues set in. The bleak wasteland of an entire week of stupefyingly boring school stretched ahead of me like an endless desert highway.”