“What humanity was about to lose, though, except for one tiny colony on Santa Rosalia, was what the trackless sea could never lose, so long as it was made of water, the ability to heal itself.”

“There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.”

“This couple, so involved with babies, had never reproduced themselves, though they could have. This was an interesting comment on the whole idea of reproduction.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”

“he predicted...that human slavery would come bac, that it had infact never gone away. he said that so many people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the government. he talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. he talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. "and nobody ever gets punished for anything," he said. "being an american means never having to say you're sorry.”

“What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.”