“And this girl—this tiny, curvaceous, engaging, walking, talking contradiction—is working her way up to Libby Fields’s position very, very quickly, which is really saying something since I’m twenty-five, not fourteen.”

“A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: "It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.”

“And this was known as that greatest of treasures, which is Hope. It was a good way of getting poorer really very quickly, and staying poor. It could be you. But it wouldn't be.”

“Walking and talking - that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.”

“Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after. ”

“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.”