“It's like the Vatican's porn collection," Zeb told her. "Safe in our hands.”

“The internet is 95 percent porn and spam”

“More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.”

“The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church.”

“She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone.”

“[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.”

“Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...”