“She had her reasons. Not that they were the same as anybody else's reasons.”

“She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?”

“There were a dozen reasons why she might refuse him. But they were all someone else’s reasons. Her mother’s, her peers’, society’s. She’d already left all those expectations behind.”

“The Chinese enjoyed the grim spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking that the world was anything else.”

“I was camped at the same site as her: Broughton Farm. She came over to my tent and showed me her blisters. She asked me whether I knew the reason why a blister can keep on producing fluid ad infinitum. I said that I had always wondered the same thing about mucus. One of the reasons we are together is because we have similar interests.”

“Brod's life was a slow realizaton that the world was not for her,and that for whatever reason,she would never be happy and honest at the same time.She felt as if she were brimming,always producing and hoarding more love inside her.But there was no release.”