“We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.”

“It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.”

“For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.”

“That was half a year and a lifetime ago. For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.”

“Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path....He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause....They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.”

“Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.”

“Live free or die.Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.”