“She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.”

“Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool.”

“There are no real Californians. There are only people who live there and people who don't.”

“When you bite into a chocolate truffle, you don't want to find oat bran.”

“Sentence should end with. Life should end with! Live life on exclamation.”

“She could no longer remember what Ambrose looked like, or smelled like, or was like. All she knew was Cassius Clayton McLinn. All she wanted began and ended with him.”

“To have reservations is to show true leadership. To have certainty without question, to lead people to battle with no qualms, or to prosecute without hesitation are qualities of a tyrant.”