“And so Yoshimi heard the dry pop one more time. Her forehead felt as if it were being crushed by a car. That was all.”

“Kraop was the sound that I heard. Heard it twice--kraop, kraop--one time each for my two fingers that got broke. I heard my bones pop before I felt anything, gunshot-loud they echoed in my ears. Maybe that was the tip-off what'd just happened was going to hurt like hell. Wrong. It hurt so bad, I didn't feel a thing.”

“Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.”

“sometimes, she felt pity for those countless nameless ones somewhere around them who, in a feverish quest, were searching for some answer, and in their search crushed others, perhaps even her; but she could not be crushed, for she had the answer.”

“I'd heard about people falling in love, and I'd heard about lust. What I had never heard about was this all-consuming need to be inside another human being. I felt this desperate compulsion to become one with him. This was desire. This was to crave. This was what if felt like to want.”

“The whispers were a sound Billy had heard every blighted day since Janie's death, all day and all night. They were terrible and quiet--the dry voices of the dead.”