“It was all so artificial. It was beautiful, but it did not belong to her. She was a tourist, an outsider, and she could only see the thin surface veneer of things; she couldn't get beneath it to the real heart of anything.”

“She had never really believed in God. There didn't seem any point in it, and he just seemed so, well, unlikely. But now, a world that definitely had no God at all felt kind of... empty. It wasn't really God she wanted; it was the possibility of God.”

“Will you be all right?"Heater on twice, color contrast down, and keep hitting buttons on the extractor fan until it stops or I go mad. I think I can manage that.”

“Don't wear yourself out Dad."Is that your way of telling your old man to shut up?”

“At times such as these, evenings in the forest, loneliness seized her like a black dog. She kept telling herself it was pure weakness, that she had to be strong to stay alive in this world. Her orphanhood hung about her like a cloak. You shall not feel sorry for yourself, she commanded, and then disobeyed... beneath the surface veneer of stubborn independence, she needed desperately to belong to somebody.”

“She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.”

“Mosca had been so busy working the oars of her little plan that she had failed to see the iceberg upon which it was doomed to founder. And now here it was in front of her, a towering glacial mountain of selfishness, and she could not understand how she could have missed it. How vast was it? How far beneath the surface did it go?”