“We're an Ag college," I explain to them. "Not as good as the one in Yanco but we have livestock.""Cows?" Anson Choi asks, covering his nose."Pigs, too. And horses. Great for growing tomatoes.The Cadets are wanna-be soldiers. City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure."I'm going to throw up," one of the guys says."Don't feel too bad," I explain. "Some of our lot did while they were laying out this stuff. Actually, right there where you're standing.”

“City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure.”

“It's hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he's playing the saxophone. Whoever's not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into agroupie.”

“i don't know what your situation is but i wanted you to know what mine is not just to explain some rude behavior, but because we're on a little boat for a while and... i'm soul sick. and you're going to see that.”

“We just want to be where we're supposed to be. We just want to be with the people we want to be with. I don't think that's asking for too much, ya know what I'm saying?”

“I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”